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Dear, Call Centers- Be Professional! Love, Your Future Customer

February 2, 2012 By

Dear Caller…

Who loves a good sales call right before (or even better, during) dinner?  You’re trying to get food on the table, kids’ homework done, the baby settled, all without punching the wall.  Throw in some difficult to decipher sales call from a call center and punching the wall becomes all but an inevitability.  To top it off, they usually ask for the wrong person, and when I say that person doesn’t live here, they try to talk to me instead.  Real professional, guys.  Calling for Mrs. Smith and settling for whoever answered the phone doesn’t exactly win you my time.  Plus, when I can’t understand you from all the background noise, it makes me realize, I really am just a number (I can’t say name because you don’t typically know it!), and I have no qualms about putting the phone back on the receiver.  I already screen my calls- if I can screen my mother, I can certainly start to screen your silly 1-800 number without feeling remorseful, too.

Try Sound Masking

I’m guessing this is not news to a call center manager.  However, it may feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle.  From having a 1-800 number on the caller ID to people being pretty impatient with unwelcome calls, you might feel there’s nothing you can do, save hope for a bored housewife.  My suggestion would be to try to up your professional game. If your product is worth buying or your cause worth investing in, take the time to make me feel safe and comfortable.  It is my opinion that the call center is responsible for providing a professional and personal call experience for their customers.  Think about the following:

  • Background sound, even other callers, can make a customer feel like a number instead of a person.
  • The same background noise can be quite distracting for both customer and caller.
  • When a potential customer hears all this, it only adds to the feeling that their personal information is up for grabs.

Noise Solutions for Call Centers

As a result, as you plan a call center or seek to resolve the common noise problems therein, here a few things you should consider:

  • Keep callers separated if possible so that they are not shoulder to shoulder as they make calls.
  • Partitions or sound-absorbing panels can lessen ambient sound.
  • Some companies offer headsets that help the callers focus on the customers and not the noise around them.
  • Finally, consider sound masking, which aides both the caller and the customer because both can hear the other person and not the craziness in the call center itself.

The goal of a call center is to get current or potential customers or donors to stay on the line, listen attentively, and be heard themselves.  This kind of interaction is only possible if the customer feels like an individual and that their personal and financial information can be given without fear of it being spread beyond the intended hearer.  If you consider these factors as you plan your call center, your chances for success are exponentially higher.

Thus, if background noise is a problem for your call center, consider sound masking for a reduction of distractions and increased speech privacy if you’d like to have a successful conversation with potential customers or donors.

 

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Sound Masking: The Solution to Office Noise

March 28, 2011 By

The average worker loses about two hours of work each day due to interruptions and distractions. Especially in the open office, employees are exposed to dozens of conversations each day that may or may not have anything to do with their current task. So much energy is spent trying to tune out everything going on around them. They have also lost all privacy for their conversations, whether in person or on the phone, adding to their feelings of stress and being undervalued.

How to control sound

Sound issues in any space can be treated in three main ways:  absorbing, blocking and covering sound. These are known as the ABC’s of noise control. These three, used in combination, provide the best solution to noise issues in an office environment. Sound is best absorbed through the use of appropriate ceiling tiles, and it is blocked by proper office panels between cubicles and offices.  However, very few offices utilize the third treatment, covering or masking sound.

What is Sound Masking?

Most offices already utilize the first two treatments, but sound masking, the most effective of the three, is often overlooked. Sound masking is the technique of adding barely noticeable background sounds to cover the intrusive noises all around us. Today’s sound masking technology floods the background with specific “white” noise focused on the spectrum of human speech. This precision of white noise will effectively cover conversations in an office setting, returning privacy to the open floor. Proper sound masking, or covering, has been shown to lower distractions by up to 51% and reduce stress by 27%, both of which contribute to employee satisfaction and productivity.

Does it really Work?

Yes. The correct use of white noise really does mask conversations and other noises that interrupt you throughout the day. This technology is used in government offices, medical facilities and many other businesses because of its effectiveness. The result is that private conversations are not overheard, and office noise is not longer a huge distraction for workers. And the best part is that this technology is now affordable to smaller businesses as well.

Most employees are interrupted several times a day by conversations and noise that does not directly involve them. In addition to sound-absorbent, ceiling tiles and sound-blocking cubicle panels, sound masking is an effective and affordable way to control sound in the work place. It covers distracting noise increasing concentrate, lowers stress levels, and returns a level of speech privacy to the open office plan.

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Continuing the Auditory Distractions Discussion

April 5, 2010 By

Last Monday we looked at a couple points that Justin Mardex made in a paper he wrote entitled Auditory, visual, and physical distractions in the workplace. Today we are going to continue to look at some more of what Mr. Mardex found in his research about auditory distractions.

Sound masking helps your workers to not even hear their coworkers conversations so they can continue to work in peace.

Mardex looked first at at noise level and how that affects a worker. The study he mentioned, which was done by Keillberg and Landstrom, was about the “relationship between noise, distraction, and annoyance.”  They found that there was a correlation between high levels of noise and annoyance, but not distraction. However, predictability was highly correlated with distraction (i.e. the less predictable the noise, the more distracted you are by it.)

Which leads into the next subject, noise variability. Mardex quotes another study which found that “habituating to consistent noise is easier than to variable noise: consequently constant noise is less annoying overall than variable noise. Therefore a sound with consistent qualities…would be much easier to acclimate to than to noise which that was in some way dynamic.”

In another section of his paper, Mardex looks at the differences between speech and other types of noise. He found that there are colleagues, computers, and other types of office equipment are listed as three of the most problematic office noise disturbances. With colleagues, the problem was with conversations, namely the “information content of their speech.”  They also found that “speech intelligibility is at the center of how disturbing a speech related noise is.” In other words, if you can’t understand what is being said, you are not as distracted by it.  With office equipment, the variability of the noise was the problem. For example, the loudness of the paper shredder or the copy machine.

Sound masking could be of benefit in all of the instances mentioned above. Not only is it a constant noise with no variability, it is not loud enough to be annoying, while maintaining a gentle hum loud enough to cover up conversations and other office noise.  The result is an overall reduction in the amount of distractions a worker is subjected to. As we saw last Friday, most workers just want a quiet place to work. Sound masking can go a long way toward creating an environment where people can focus on their work.

How do you think sound masking could help in your office?

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Let Them Work In Peace

March 29, 2010 By

In 2004, Justin Mardex,  who at the time was a Masters student at Cornell University in the department of Design and Environmental Analysis, wrote a paper about “Auditory, Visual, and Physical Distractions in the Workplace” and has graciously published it online. (What a guy.)  In this paper, he quotes some eye opening statistics and I would like to highlight a couple of them. We are focusing on auditory distractions, but the entire paper is worth a read should you have spare time this afternoon.

‘Ability to do distraction free solo work’

The first startling statistic he quotes is from a study done in 2002. “In a survey of 13000 office employees, the workplace attribute found to be most effective was the ‘ability to do distraction free solo work‘ followed by ‘support for impromptu interactions (both in one’s workspace and elsewhere.)” These employees just want a place where they can think and work by themselves, unless they need help or need to bounce some ideas off of someone else.

Improved Productivity
Mardex also quotes some findings by the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). This group did a national survey and found that “more than 70 percent of respondents indicated that their productivity would improve if their workspace was less noisy. A similar ASID survey of corporate executives indicated that only 19 percent were conscious of any sort of noise problem.”  In other words, the workers say they would just like a quiet place to work ,and their management is unaware of the problem.

You are aware of a problem if you are reading this site. Your workers would like a quiet place to work, but still have the (much needed) freedom to share ideas and provide important feedback on work that is being done. They also feel that if they are given a quiet place to work, their productivity will go up. We think the best way to facilitate this is sound masking.  It is loud enough to drown out conversational distractions, but unlike headphones or strict rules about noise, still allows for discussions. According to these studies, your workers will thank you for it.

Next Monday, we will highlight some other points that Mr. Mardex made in his very helpful paper. See you then!

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Everybody’s doing it

November 5, 2009 By

Distractions may not seem like a big problem.  Maybe your employees shoot off a few unnecessary texts or answer a couple personal calls.  Everybody does, right?  That’s the problem.  Everybody does, which means that the average worker loses more than two hours every day to distractions.  In fact, the work place, and open offices in general, have become so distracting that more than 70% of surveyed workers said that their productivity would be increased if their work place were less noisy.

How do you conduct business with less sound? 

While you can try to ban personal calls, you can’t keep people from making business calls, closing doors and flushing toilets.  That’s the cost of doing business.  But you can minimize the distraction level with sound masking.  Sound masking functions like white noise, cancelling out unwanted and distracting noise.  Unlike white noise, however, sound masking can be distributed uniformly and at the lowest volume necessary for maximum productivity.  That way, you’re not trading one problem for another. 

Contact us for more information on how to keep your employees focused on what really counts: work.

 

Malachowski, Dan.  Wasting Time at Work Costing Companies Billions.  Retrieved August 10, 2009, from http://www.davidsonstaffing.com/articles/salary/wasted-time/.

Mardex, Justin. (2004) Auditory, visual, and physical distractions in the workplace.  Retrieved August 17, 2009 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/13038258/Auditory-visual-and-physical-distractions-in-the-workplace

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October 27, 2009 By

The sounds heard round the office

Whether intentionally or not, the average employee spends more than two hours of her work day distracted.  She starts a task and hears a phone ring.  She wonders who it is and whether it is a personal call.  She refocuses, only to hear the elevator ding.  She tries again and hears the copier start, so she leaves her desk to chat with her co-worker making copies.  Regardless of good intentions, this employee doesn’t stand a chance of being productive for more than a few minutes at a time.

Business must go on

We are in the worst recession in decades, yet deadlines and quotas must be met- all with less resources than you’ve ever had.  Getting work done with fewer staff in the same eight-hour day seems impossible.  Fortunately it isn’t.  Many companies like yours have turned to sound masking as a solution for office distractions.  Similar to the concept of white noise, treated areas are immune to the noisy interruptions that every open office inevitably has.  And, with direct-field technology, our system is precise and uniform, resulting in a quieter and more productive work environment for your employees. 

When resources are scarce, turn to a solution that is precise and no-maintenance.

Malachowski, Dan.  Wasting Time at Work Costing Companies Billions.  Retrieved August 10, 2009, from http://www.davidsonstaffing.com/articles/salary/wasted-time/.

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