Why Your Agents’ Headsets May Be Hurting Customer Experience and What To Do About It
With Chris Clark, National Partner Manager at Jabra
Show Notes
Chris Clark is the National Partner Manager at Jabra in New Zealand.
Chris has been in the unified communications - or call centric - industry for 15 years. As a result, he’s got great insight into best-practice when it comes to contact centre headsets.
Today, he shares why your agents’ headsets may be hurting customer experience, and what to do about it.
You'll Learn:
The 2 key elements of audio which determine customer satisfaction (06:00).
Why your current headsets may allow hackers to listen in to customer conversations, and the technology you can use to prevent it (09:32).
Why many headsets are inappropriate for use in contact centres (10:41).
Why noise cancellation in headsets is terrible for contact centres, and a better approach (11:44).
The headsets which are now working hand in hand with AI (14:35).
Why it’s critical to ensure your headsets are certified by the platforms you use (18:06).
The 2 common mistakes Chris sees in headset selection for agents (21:03).
Chris’ biggest piece of advice for choosing headsets for your agents (26:18).
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds of the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership System enables contact centres to increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets.
Today I'm very fortunate to be joined by Chris Clark, from the global audio technology company, Jabra. Chris, welcome along.
Chris Clark (00:25)
Hey Blair, nice to be here. Thank you very much for having me.
Blair Stevenson (00:27)
So as a starting point, just tell us a bit about yourself and also about Jabra.
Chris Clark (00:32)
I'm Chris Clark. I'm the National Partner Manager at Jabra. I have been in the unified communications - or call centric - space now for 15 years. So it's kind of growing on me. And when we talk about change, it's been an incredible industry to be part of, and particularly in the last 18 months, from a change perspective.
Now, Jabra itself. So Jabra is the world's leading UC (Unified Communications) headset manufacturer. One of the world's leading UC headset manufacturer and intelligent camera manufacturer.
And we actually sit under a much bigger global organisation called GN Group. That company itself actually sits across three audio verticals. So, medical, we're the world's largest hearing aid manufacturer. Then there's enterprise, which is Jabra. So in our hearing aid area, we have ReSound - GN ReSound - and we have GN Jabra, which is enterprise and contact centre, which is myself and where I sit. along with my Country Manager, Brent Mitchell.
And then we have a consumer grade, which is where you will see the ear pods and ear buds coming in. So one really cool feature about that, is that technology right from our hearing aids does stream right across, and it allows us to design and manufacture audio devices which are quite aligned with people in mind.
Blair Stevenson (01:54)
Fantastic. You mentioned this huge impact of the pandemic over the last 18 months, and there's been obviously a huge shift to remote work. What's that done in terms of demand for high quality headsets?
Chris Clark (02:12)
Well, absolutely. Nothing could have prepared us for what took place 15 months ago. We always talked about in our industry the need to work more remotely, or the 'hybrid worker,' et cetera. So it's something we've talked about for a really long time.
And then all of a sudden everything happened, and this massive wave and this requirement to move from a traditional single place of work - or this desk space type tradition, if we specifically talk about that - had to quickly adapt and change into this hybrid work.
In particular, in that instance, it was this massive working from home requirement. So we just saw this incredible demand. It was amazing. And at this stage, initially, it was just whatever headset you could get on. It was very hard to get hold of any hardware.
In fact, some hardware manufacturers had to actually hire aircraft to get their own stuff in, because New Zealand at the same time as this demand had about an 80% decrease in their freight, because New Zealand relies heavily on passenger aircraft for freight.
So there were two complexities. So one was, there's was a massive demand. And secondly, there was not enough freight to get it in. And then we had the manufacturing part. So we saw this incredible shift.
If we were to specifically talk about Microsoft Teams, for example, I know that's not contact centre in this instance, but it's a great example, before we talk about that virtual contact centre space.
Blair Stevenson (03:54)
And also used extensively by contact centres as well.
Chris Clark (03:57)
Absolutely. If you were to look at any kind of contact centre organisation, they'll traditionally have their platform and then they'll have Microsoft Teams. What took place with Teams was the plan was a traditional organic growth of 24 months. But actually what was meant to happen in 24 months happened in two months.
So that was the sheer take-up. And now we're talking about figures of 250 million users a month for Teams, right? This is just specifically talking about Teams.
And so what we've found out since then, and as we start to see information coming out of our strategic alliances and whatnot as we collect data, because it's still early days. We're now seeing that the use of Teams, the majority up to 65% of Team users actually still rely on the laptop speaker and microphone as their audio device.
And don't get me wrong. I'm not putting down laptop speakers and microphones. We've got amazing partners there. But what that means is that as a tool for audio, we're not necessarily on the right path, particularly with contact centre. So then the next shift was this massive take up of virtual contact centre as well, which is what we saw.
So this massive shift to go from a traditional contact centre type setup into a virtual contact centre. And of course, a lot of them had headsets, but they might not have had the correct one for working from home. And as I can talk on about, I can talk about headsets all day. We have over 80 variants ourselves. You might've had the headset for your contact centre, but you might not have had the right one for a virtual contact centre.
Blair Stevenson (05:43)
You’re talking about the right one. Thinking from a contact centre perspective, why is high quality audio so important? And I'm thinking about that from two perspectives, one is from the agent perspective, but also from the customer's perspective.
Chris Clark (06:00)
Yeah, absolutely. So if you were to look at any survey that's ever done on contact centre customer satisfaction, or if we looked at any survey on customer satisfaction specifically to audio, for any organisation it comes down to two things, really. 2.5 things.
One is, let's say I'm the agent. Blair, you're the customer. Or vice versa. The first thing is, 'can you hear me?' So I'm the customer, Blair, can you hear me talking to you? And then the second part to that is, can I hear Blair talking to me? So is there a clear conversation taking place? Are we communicating okay? Absolutely. That's fine.
Now there's a second part to it, and that is, 'can I be heard?' And what I mean by that is, in an age of security, where everything in security is paramount, what part of my conversation is being heard outside of the conversation I'm having with Blair? Can others hear?
How many times have you called a contact centre, and you've been able to hear a conversation happening outside of our conversation? So I know, personally, I called a contact centre a while ago, and I could hear an agent celebrating an award. I could hear them clapping and yelling and cheering and saying, "Yay, well done." Which I found ironic because that's information, right?
That's data that I'm hearing. So you think about sensitivity of a lot of contact centres. And if you think about the kind of information that gets passed around, some of it is very sensitive and private and from a security perspective, critical. And if two agents down, if the conversation is getting into their chat, we've got a data problem there, and a massive impact on customer satisfaction. So that's just one part.
And so this is why you've got to really make sure you're making sure information is kept within the conversation. I can show you an example. And I'm not using another contact centre headset here, but if I was to ... one moment. Right now, I'm talking to you on the laptop speaker and microphone. Let's just say that that is a contact centre headset.
And if I play noise, which I'm sure you can hear, that noise is probably now getting into conversation. It's distracting. If I move to a headset, you might still be able to hear the sound, but almost immediately you should be able to hear a difference to the audio quality. And so this is a clear example, I'm actually going to turn it off now because it is distracting, but here's a clear example of why picking the right kind of technology around that.
I know I'm segueing a bit there, but that's really critical to customer satisfaction. And that's why picking the right headset, or the right device, around protection there.
Blair Stevenson (09:23)
Yeah. So what other critical criteria are there for contact centre headsets?
Chris Clark (09:32)
There's kind of two parts, that you've got that security. Well, three parts. There's the security, there's the audio quality. And then there's the comfort perspective, because what we've always got to consider is the person actually wearing the headset and the product on the day.
So we've already talked about one part of the audio, the security part. Now there's another section. If you're going to go wireless, you've got to make sure that you're looking at the right wireless technology for a contact centre. So we have a difference.
We have Bluetooth and we have DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Communications). DECT is a high-end strong signal technology. It allows you to have more people, more density, but also now with some of our headsets, we've encrypted that signal. So there's another path, right?
So you think about another window with Bluetooth. We're talking about a very small signal which we can miniaturise, and that's why we can have it, but it's weak. It's also easy to get into. With DECT, you've got a bigger signal, but with a bigger signal, you've got more chance of people being able to get into that signal. So you've got to make sure you encrypt it and protect it.
But the other big thing would be comfort. So agents, that's a really specific career. So I'm passionate about contact centre, by the way. And I'm also very passionate about the contact centre role, the agent role. There's some extremely good agents out there, and it's important that you considering them in that part.
So if I was to show you this, for example, this is a Jabra headset, and it's kind of nice looking and it's similar to what you've got on your head there. This is what everyone wants, right? It's a really cool headset, but you've really got to consider, "Can you have this on your head all day long?"
So we talk about the contact centre looking headset. Now they're both the same price, thereabouts. When you talk about a contact centre headset, you talk about a couple of things that you've got to consider. You've got to consider things like weight, this headset is going to be on your head all day long. It's something you've really got to consider. It's got to be comfortable. It's got to be light.
The second thing you've got to consider is sound. So everyone these days wants to block out sound. They love this active noise cancellation, they love the ability to suppress sound and keep it out. But it's actually a terrible tool for contact centre, in my opinion. When you block out sound, essentially you put yourself in a bubble.
And if you can't monitor your voice, you start to talk really, really loud. Now, if you times that by 300 or 400, you just get this massive elevation in sound. Your contact centre gets really loud, and everything we've just been talking about has being defeated. So sound cancellation is important. but to an extent.
It's really important that you have the right amount of sound coming in, that you can monitor your voice. And you can do that through two points, two ways of technology with headsets. You can either have sidetone, which is feeding sound back into your ear and monitoring your voice that way, and using passive noise cancellation, which is what I'm using, which is a natural form of cancellation of noise, which you can achieve in several ways.
One is you just make the ear coverage bigger, and you use a design that deflects sound. And what it does is it blocks out enough sound, but it also doesn't block out too much sound so that your voice is managed and that your contact centre is quiet.
Blair Stevenson (13:01)
What you're saying makes a huge amount of sense. There's a level of complexity here...
Chris Clark (13:07)
Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing how many people want active noise cancellation. Well with active noise cancellation, you get a massive engine that's got a bit of heat to it. They look amazing. I love these headsets. I love them. But I don't wear them when I'm talking lots, because I've got to make sure that it's a balance, right? These are great for concentration, and collaboration, and task based workers.
At Jabra, we break things up into several groups. One's called Call Centric. We have a whole range designed for contact centre, keeping it light, and there's reasons why there's different variables to that. And then we've got Task-Based, which is collaboration, concentration. And then we've got Mobility. Obviously people on the go.
So these are all the things you've got to really take into consideration. But with virtualisation, you have to really get focused on what you want to do.
Blair Stevenson (13:57)
You do. And I see your point, because I love this headset, but frankly, I couldn't wear it all day. I can wear it an hour at a time, that's fine.
Chris Clark (14:06)
Absolutely. If you think about an agent, that's their tool. That's their hammer, that's their airplane. That's their thing. A very, very personal item, and very important that it's the correct one.
Blair Stevenson (14:22)
Okay. So thinking about the correct one. One of the things that I'm noticing is there's a rise in conversational AI tools. What demand is that putting on headset capability?
Chris Clark (14:35)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you were to look at any of the major platforms - and by the way, I'm a headset expert, so I don't want to get too heavily involved in talking about other platforms - but if you look at it all the major players, the Genesis', the Amazon's of the world. If you look at what they're doing with their technology, it's aligned with everything else, which is data capture, right?
The valuable commodity of the 21st century is data, and how much you can capture of it, and what you can take out of that, push that on. If you look at a Google or anyone in this world, that's kind of what they do. So the newer platforms look at capturing data.
And so we have to essentially design and create headsets that not only do everything we just talked about from a comfort perspective and a technology perspective, but we also have to make sure that this also becomes an IoT (Internet Of Things) sensor or a tool that can capture data, and then interpret that data back into these platforms, so that this is the device that captures the data for those platforms.
So for example, we have a range called 'Engage', and those headsets have a chipset in them. This is actually one of them. Now this microphone on these types of headsets do a couple of things. They capture the sound around. So everything that we talked about, they monitor that, they capture that.
They capture my voice, and they can also capture what's happening, as in where the microphone has been placed, and you can notice the difference between when I do that. It changes my voice, right? And they can actually provide real time analytics and kick that back.
So at Jabra, we have a developers portal, all of our APIs and SDKs (Software Development Kits) are open source and free. And we allow our partners to grab those and take that data that's been captured by these headsets, and kick that back to whatever they are doing.
So AI is becoming everything. So data is one particular part, and then with that data, you can do all sorts of things with processing that. So you can monitor things like, "Is sound getting into this conversation Chris is having with Blair? How is that having an impact on the conversation?"
And then what we can do is, you could potentially with a certain type of headset that we have, you can change the colour on either Chris's headset to say that someone else's sound's getting in, or you can change the color on the person's microphone that's kicking that sound into the conversation.
These are the types of things that you can do with these platforms. That's an example that requires a development. That's not an out of the box thing, but it is possible. You can have colour change, you can have all sorts of things that can change the conversation in a positive way through data capture.
You can allow a button that changes the colour to tell your team leader that Chris is under a bit of stress when he's talking to Blair, it's not a great conversation. So it's things like that that you can do now with headsets. And these are the things we have to consider when we design anything new. So anything new that we bring out now has an element of IoT to it.
Blair Stevenson (17:45)
So I've heard the term 'certified headsets', and you've mentioned Genesis and Amazon, different platforms available. So would it be right in thinking that you are working with those platform providers to ensure that your headsets work them?
Chris Clark (18:06)
Yeah, absolutely. Certification is absolutely critical to any kind of headset that's going to sit on a platform. So touching on what I talked about earlier, which is when we have this massive kind of rollout of different platforms, and right now, for example, I'm on a Teams certified headset, and a Zoom certified headset.
What that means is when a platform is released or created, we have a headset that we create and we test that on their platform from a security and performance view, and a functionality perspective. So there's a couple of things that you've got to consider.
One is remote call control. What that means is, I can hang up the conversation with you right now from here, instead of having to get my mouse and click it from here. If you look specifically at a platform like a Genesis or an Amazon, with remote call control, we have auto answer, which is a tone plays in the ear of the agent and then the call is put through. So you've got to make sure that the base of the headset that it sits on, in that speed in which the calls coming in, can then answer the call.
There's so much more complexity in the backend that you've got to design. So when we design a headset, we certify them. So that's why certification is so critical. Things like with Microsoft, they have microphone certifications. Open Office Standard, for example, this is what I'm using at the moment, and what I gave you an example of. That is a noise suppression microphone.
That's essentially, we've got a headset that's listening to what's going on, listening to what's me, and then determining which one's me and what needs to be heard and what doesn't. These are the types of certifications you have to get.
There is a critical difference between certified headsets and non-certified headsets. And it has an actual impact on how people are interpreted and perceived. So how you're heard is how you're perceived, right? So if you're in a café or an open office, or wherever you are. In my instance, a couple of kids during lockdown.
I'm in knowledge transfer, that's my commodity. My Managing Director always says to me, "You're paid to transfer knowledge, you don't measure doorframes or fly airplanes or build houses. Your whole job is to transfer knowledge."
And if my sound or my environment is having an impact on the transfer of knowledge, which is the same as a contact centre, then I'm essentially not adding any value. I'm null and void. And you need certified headsets to really make sure and ensure that that knowledge transfer process isn't being impacted by bad audio quality.
Blair Stevenson (20:49)
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So now I'm wondering, what are some of the mistakes that you notice contact centre technology decision-makers making around the selection of headsets?
Chris Clark (21:03)
Certainly I don't want to feel like I'm telling people that they're making mistakes, but you do see some things that take place, which you think, "That's probably not the right fit." And it harks back to what I was talking about. We have a contact centre range of headsets. We have a task-based range of headsets. And there is a key difference between the both of them.
I see the likes of these types of devices (task-based headsets) being put into contact centres, because that's what they think is common or cheap and cheerful. That's a perfect example.
And when I go back to customer satisfaction in audio, and I go back to the importance of an agent and their career and how crucial they are to your organisation. I'm sure, Blair, you and I will agree how hard it is to make sure that you retain the very best staff in your contact centre, this is one part that's really important.
And if you go on to that certification piece, ensuring that you're actually purchasing or implementing when deploying a solution the right headset with it is critical. So to deploy a contact centre suite is not an affordable process. That's a cost. It's complex. It requires lots of project driven parts to it. It has lots to it. It costs money.
And what I see time and time again, is large deployments taking place, and then the headset's considered as a consumable or peripheral that sits at the end. It's not considered in the project. So many instances where we have organisations which have spent lots and lots of money deploying headsets, and then they haven't considered that last piece.
Now that could be educational. So what what's really important is the headset's considered to be part of the project. It's the critical last two or three feet, or wireless feet of the project. Because it does have an impact on how your company operates, or how your contact centre operates.
Blair Stevenson (23:07)
Totally. Just thinking forward, what sort of technologies are likely to be sort of coming in the future for contact centres which will impact on audio technology?
Chris Clark (23:17)
It's all going to be in that AI space. So we can have virtual environments and we already know, and we've proven that this kind of virtual contact centre is a thing. So the next steps, and if you were to look at any of the trends coming through, it's about more of a data capture, or an AI side of things.
For example, there are so many bio authentication components to your voice, there are so many parts of your voice that - I've probably got the medical term wrong - but there's so many parts of your voice that contributes to your identity, how you're feeling, what's going on in your mind.
So if you think about a contact centre, for example, and I come on to the contact centre, the automation before, and it says, "Please say your name." And I say, "Chris Clark", now that can detect how I'm feeling, by capturing their voice. This is just an example of what potentially we'll see.
Now the bio points of my voice are interpreted by that software, and it tells them that Chris is not in a good mood. He's got this amount of stress, et cetera, et cetera. But we know that Blair in team Yellow actually deals really well with the customers like Chris. So they can match from a productivity perspective.
Now, what I'm saying is we don't want to be kicking Blair angry customers all the time. But we can kick Blair angry customers all the time, and we can reward Blair for being able to deal with angry customers all the time, because he's a specialist in it, right?
By doing that, we can see our standouts, we can manage and do the performance side of stuff better because we can reward people for doing something better, because we know that Blair deals well with that type of customer. But Chris deals better from an empathetic perspective.
Now, when Chris comes through to that conversation with Blair, that continuing on of detection of voice can give Blair, will be able to spit back real time algorithms to tell Blair the conversation's going well.
That's technology on the forefront. It's almost there now, but it's what we're seeing from an AI perspective. But I'm sure if you were to talk to any platform specialist, the people that look after the Genesis's and Amazon's, they'd have some incredible stuff to talk about on the technology that's coming in the future. It's pretty exciting.
The other thing would be miniaturising our stuff. Getting these smaller and more comfortable with more technology.
Blair Stevenson (26:02)
Cool. Okay. Just to finish up, what would be one piece of hard won advice that you have to contact centre leaders, regarding the headset technology they choose for their agents?
Chris Clark (26:18)
Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice is to consider the two most important parts of your contact centre. One is the agent. So making sure that they're comfortable and they've got the right designed headset for their career and what they're doing as a job.
And the second part is considering the customer and what their experience is. So when it comes to headsets, it's got to be comfortable and work really well for the agent. And it has to have the right audio technology to make sure the conversation's clear whilst protecting the customer's security. Those would be the two key points, because that's what it's all about.
Certified headsets; when you make that investment, it actually has a bigger impact long-term, you can actually ultimately long-term improve the overall experience. And whatever the business is trying to achieve, I think it would have a much bigger impact on it that way as well.
Blair Stevenson (27:17)
Awesome. Chris, thank you very much for sharing your expertise. I really appreciate it.
Chris Clark (27:21)
You're welcome, Blair. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate it.
Blair Stevenson (27:24)
For listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Chris on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccjabra/), you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too.
Lastly, if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonblair/), you'll also find a link to my profile there as well.
Well, that's it from us today. Have a productive week.