Removing background noise is a longstanding contact centre concern. White noise machines, higher cubicle walls, and larger office spaces have somewhat suppressed the problem, but not completely. After all, contact centres are often vibrant environments. Maintenance repair work, distracting colleagues, and noisy keyboards can detract from excellent customer conversations.
Yet, the switch to remote work has furthered the issue. Barking dogs, delivery drivers, and noisy housemates create additional distractions that disrupt customer and agent experiences. Unfortunately, sticky tape solutions – such as working from a quiet room, covering walls with soft furnishings, and moving closer to the microphone – just do not cut it as remote working becomes more of a mainstay by the minute.
Of course, this is not true for every operation. Some agents will soon move back to the contact centre full-time. However, this is more the exception than the rule. In fact, only 16% of companies have said they plan to bring their employees back into the office once the pandemic has subsided, according to a 2021 Buffer report.
As a result, most contact centres must embrace this new “hybrid” reality. And now is the time to fully equip agents to block out background noises and enable more engaging and trustworthy customer experiences – from both the contact centre and remote locations. This is the key to driving greater customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing agent churn.
Enter Krisp
Traditional solutions that combat background noise – including noise-cancelling headsets – are expensive and often difficult to deploy at scale, particularly within a distributed workforce. Krisp, on the other hand, offers a cost-effective, easy-to-implement alternative.
At the toggle of a button, loud washing machines, screaming children, and other noises become problems of the past. What’s more, agents will not hear distracting noises on the other end of the line either.
Thanks to an AI layer that sits between agents and their devices, the app enables seamless, distraction-free interactions, bringing many benefits to contact centre agents, whether they’re working on-site or from home. Here are ten worth noting:
- Bi-Directional Noise Cancellation
Traditionally, many view noise cancellation as cutting out sounds within the agent’s environment alone. Yet, such an approach only blocks background noise from one direction. Agents must still avoid distractions that lurk within the often-vibrant surroundings of their customers.
However, the AI layer within the Krisp app sieves through the audio as it comes back to the agent. Therefore, the innovation protects everyone from disruptions during a call, whether the customer has installed the app or not.
- HD Voice
Krisp does not claim to enhance voice quality. However, by minimising an entire array of background distractions, the app succeeds at maintaining the natural HD quality of a person’s voice.
In other words, the solution enables listeners to hear the speaker—and the speaker alone. Clarity, therefore, reigns supreme, allowing agents to engage in more natural, meaningful conversations.
- Echo Removal
When a room has poor acoustics, echoes bounce off the walls. Krisp filters out those noises, too, to ensure that clear conversations prevail.
During video interactions, the value of such a feature grows as reverb is often more prominent. With more operations likely to adopt the channel in the future, it is crucial to consider this issue closely.
The additional benefits of echo removal extend beyond the confines of customer conversations. Consider environments where conference rooms play host to internal interactions. These are prone to echo. As such, the Krisp app is the ideal solution for more productive and clear conversations across a business’s entire workforce—beyond customer service interactions alone.
- Voice Cancellation
Like a biometrics system, users can now train Krisp to recognise their voices. In doing so, it registers the pitch of each agent’s voice as high, medium, or low.
Such functionality allows the app to block out opposing voices in the background. So, for example, if a family member bursts into the agent’s room speaking loudly, chances are that the customer will remain oblivious to the incident. Agents can then remain confident that they are delivering an excellent, uninterrupted customer experience regardless of what’s happening around them.
Krisp Voice Cancellation is a first-ever for the industry. And over time, it will continue to grow in nuance and sophistication to recognise individual voices and offer agents an even greater sense of privacy and security.
- Low Power Mode
Modern-day agents have several programmes installed on their desktops. From real-time analytics to scheduling apps, there is often heavy pressure on the processing power of their PCs.
Fortunately, Krisp avoids adding to this issue with its low power mode. Even in environments where agents do not use the latest and greatest machines, contact centres can rest assured that the app is not overtaxing the CPU or interfering with other apps to safeguard agent productivity during customer interactions.
- Seamless Integration
No matter which online conferencing solution, softphone, or headset agents use, they can choose Krisp as their microphone and speaker with a single click.
Simply downloading the app onto the agent’s device makes this possible. As such, Krisp fulfils its goal of delivering an all-around effortless experience.
- Virtual Backgrounds
Discussing the future of omnichannel service, Martin Hill Wilson says in a CX Effect report: “We have to accomplish a connection between providing choice and understanding what a customer wants to do.”
Asynchronous messaging enables such a choice for texting customers. Yet, there is no similar solution for contact centres that offer video. In time, this may well lead to agents interacting with customers through numerous video apps. Such a scenario is already the case across many technical support stations.
However, with the Krisp camera, agents can access a range of professional background options—or even add their own custom-branded background, too. So, no matter what online conferencing solution they use, they can feel fully confident in their surroundings, even when working from home.
- Privacy
Krisp does not store any audio that passes through the app in the cloud. It is processed uniquely and locally on each user’s device. This further ensures that customer conversations, especially those that require the customer to share personal or sensitive information, remain completely private.
With rising concerns surrounding customer data and privacy, Krisp differentiates itself by only transferring conversational insights to the cloud to help support remote agent management.
- Conversational Insights
Make sure that agents lead interactions that drive two-way conversations with their customers by harnessing the Talk Time insights that Krisp captures in real-time. This allows agents – and contact centre leaders – to uncover the time and duration when Krisp is active as well as the agent’s total speaking time in relation to the customer. Soon, they’ll also be able to monitor the frequency with which agents use “filler words,” such as “um,” “uh-huh,” and “ah.”
Not only are these insights available to agents, but leaders can also harness them to monitor agent performance from afar. As such, contact centre managers can use those insights to provide an extra layer of coaching and support, which sometimes goes amiss in remote environments.
For example, if an agent uses lots of filler words during a customer conversation, that perhaps indicates that they are not confident in handling that specific query or struggling to find the right information to pass back to the customer. Leaders can use those call insights to provide tailored coaching to help agents improve their skills and become more effective and efficient with each call.
- Easy to Deploy
Integrating Krisp across all contact centre agents – whether on-site or remote – is simple, as it is only a matter of downloading the app to an agent’s device.
Compare that to the process of distributing headsets, which is particularly arduous for remote contact centres. Uncovering each employee’s address, waiting for them to arrive, making sure they are comfortable for every agent. Then, there is the need to extend business insurance to cover the remote use of such expensive equipment. Krisp removes all the hassle with its easy-to-implement noise cancellation and talk time insights solution that works with a single click.
Eager to take your customer conversations to the next level? See how Krisp allows agents to become communication superheroes by visiting krisp.ai
