If you have to call a company’s call center, what impression do you get from there being noticeable amounta of background noise from other calls that nearby agents are taking?
I think either low budget or unprofessional. If you cannot afford at least cube wall separators for your agents, you do not value your customers.
It depends. In general I don’t care, but I could hear something that would make me question the competency of the company I’m dealing with.
I was involved in some funny crosstalk not too long ago. There were two different groups of people at our company and at a customer site diagnosing two differen problems on speakerphone. Both groups at each site were physically close enough to get all sorts of crosstalk. Sometimes from the physical proximity of the people, sometimes from one phone picking up the conversation from the other. Everybody knew everybody else and recognized most voices. I was most confused because I had been called into one conversation in the middle and I was remote and had no idea who was where and in what conversation. So we all had a good laugh.
I do call center work from home and I can get fired for having background noise. No TVs, no barking dogs, no people talking, no ringing phones, etc. allowed.
I don’t want the noise either, it’s distracting.
If I call a center that has noise in the background I think they are unprofessional.
What a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of call center employees work from their home.
One night I had to call Geek Squad and I could hear a party going on in the background. It didn’t take long to figure out that the guy who answered had been celebrating a bit too much to be helpful anyway. I hung up and called back and got the next person in the queue. I didn’t report him but I wonder how long he kept his job. I don’t think it made Geek Squad look unprofessional but I guess it would look that way to people who don’t know he was probably working from home.
I used to call people working in a fairly noisy environment, and it didn’t bother me because I knew to expect it. But if the noise was so loud that I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, of course that would annoy me.
In general, why would I care? Call centers are for taking calls so naturally other people around the person I’m speaking with are doing so. Same for most offices.
I have trouble understanding people over the phone already, so background noise makes it that much harder. Add to that the number of call center workers who aren’t native English speakers (and some who learned British English, so there’s two accents to deal with), the technical nature of most of the calls I’m making, and an often sloppy attitude toward worker training, and communication can get difficult in a hurry. I really appreciate companies that make it as easy on me and on the other person as possible.
My impression is that background noise is usually a function of cheap phones or headsets as much as an actual ambient noise problem. Please, please do not cheap out on your employee’s phones! It’s not a luxury - difficult communication can and will cost you.
I hate it. I have tinnitus, and some days it’s worse than others. If it’s one of those days when the tinnitus is particularly bad, and the person on the other end is on a speaker phone, or cheap phone, or their mouthpiece is far from their mouth, then I have a hard time understanding them. It’s even worse if the person’s first language isn’t American English. I remember calling someone for tech support, and he had the most enchanting Irish accent…but I could barely understand him. I could have listened to him forever, just for the music of his voice, but I needed information, not just the music.
I work at an internal call center, and my problem is almost always the opposite - my work environment is pleasantly quiet, but my caller can’t bear to hold the phone up to their mouth, or there’s a party going on, or there’s a bunch of people around them, chatting.
I end up saying “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,” over and over until they take me off speaker, put the phone up to their mouth, or tell the others around them to head off.
I used to have a mail order catalogue who took to phoning to ask if I wanted to order anything as they had special offers today blah de blah. Half the time I couldn’t hear what they were saying because of the background noise of other operators speaking to customers trying the same spiel on them. Drove me so mad I used to hang up on them.
Even worse that calling a call center and hearing lots of background chatter, is when some %&#* <insert BBQ Pit language here> ^#%@ telemarketer calls me and there’s lots of background chatter.
Even more annoying still is when I answer the phone and it’s a robo-dialed telemarketer and there’s nobody there and ALL I hear is a roomfull of background chatter. (Not that I actually want any telemarketer to talk to me, of course.)
Of course, I have an answering mochine by which to screen my calls, so all I really have to do is run through all the messages sometime later at my least inconvenience to delete them.
Regarding telemarketers in general, of course, <refer to all 10million prior SDMB threads on telemarketers>