In most contact centers, CX problems show up in familiar ways.
They appear as longer calls, lower CSAT, more escalations, or agents who seem less effective than before.
When those signals appear, teams respond logically. They retrain agents and review processes.
But a recent Hiver podcast on CX observability highlighted something unexpected. In the episode, Luke Jamieson, CX Evangelist at Operata and former contact center leader, shared insights from an analysis of 148,000 calls linked to service desk tickets. He explained that the issues were not just driven by policy confusion, agent skill gaps, or broken workflows. A lot of them were linked to audio quality.
When audio quality goes down, customers see it as poor service. And that disconnect quietly distorts the way contact centers measure, manage, and improve CX.
Building on insights from the podcast, along with broader operational experience, this article explores how sound problems influence customer experience and affect performance data.
How Poor Call Quality Gets Mistaken for Poor Service
A customer calls with a simple question. The agent is trained, polite, and ready to help. On paper, everything should go smoothly. But within seconds, small sound issues begin to interfere. The conversation feels harder than it should.
Customers don’t think about systems or network conditions. They only notice when a call feels difficult.
What does that look like in practice?
- The customer has to repeat the same sentence twice.
- Both sides keep talking over each other.
- The agent says, “Sorry, could you repeat that?” more than once.
- The customer says, “You’re breaking up.”
- The agent sounds distant or distracted because the sound isn’t clear.
None of these moments feels technical to the customer. They just consider it poor service. Inside the contact center, though, they’re often treated as performance issues. That gap between experience and diagnosis is where many CX problems start.
Why Call Quality Rarely Shows Up in CX Reporting
Most contact centers collect enormous volumes of data. They track handle times, abandonment rates, service levels, transfers, escalations, sentiment, and QA scores. Yet one category of signal rarely gets analyzed with the same rigor: Call quality at the infrastructure level.
What 148,000 Calls Reveal
During his discussions, Luke Jamieson shared findings from an analysis of 148,000 calls tied to service desk tickets. The data showed that many calls flagged as service issues were actually affected by sound problems during the conversation.
“54% of all recorded issues were directly linked to call quality,” said Luke, during the conversation about CX observability.
In the episode, Jamieson also explains how these audio issues surface in day-to-day operations and why they often go unnoticed. You can watch the full episode here.
Why That Number Changes the Diagnosis
The significance of that figure is what it reframes. If more than half of reported call issues stem from audio conditions, then many “performance” conversations inside contact centers are being built on incomplete diagnoses.
Teams retrain agents. Supervisors intensify coaching. Leaders adjust workforce models. Meanwhile, the underlying friction, device conflicts, network instability, browser updates, and headset inconsistencies continue to distort the experience.
The data suggests that call quality is a primary driver of the problems many teams are trying to solve elsewhere.
How Call Quality Issues Distort Key CX Metrics
Call quality problems affect productivity, which in turn affects the metrics leaders depend on to understand performance. When audio breaks down, the numbers change, but the root cause often goes unrecognized.
Wrong Microphone After Teams
Agents frequently switch between internal collaboration tools and their contact center platform. If the system fails to revert to the correct microphone, customers may hear distant, muffled, or inconsistent audio.
Metric impact: Average handle time rises as calls stretch longer than necessary. CSAT can dip, and the agent’s performance may appear inconsistent, even though the root cause is technical.
One-Way Audio
In one-way audio situations, either the customer or the agent cannot hear the other clearly. What begins as a brief technical glitch quickly escalates into confusion. Customers assume the agent is not responding. Agents assume the customer has disconnected. Calls may be dropped and redialed, adding friction before the real issue is even addressed.
Metric impact: Confusion early in the call often leads to more callbacks, higher abandonment, and unnecessary escalations as frustration builds.
Wi-Fi vs. Ethernet Instability
Remote and hybrid work environments introduce variability in network stability. A minor bandwidth drop from Ethernet to Wi-Fi can introduce latency that degrades voice clarity. The conversation continues, but with interruptions, overlaps, and repeated confirmations.
Metric impact: Calls run longer than expected, first-contact resolution drops, and customers are more likely to reach out again because the initial interaction lacked clarity.
Network-Related Audio Disruptions
Even minor sound disruptions can quietly lengthen a call. When words drop or overlap, customers and agents slow down, clarify more often, and repeat key details to avoid mistakes.
The impact may seem small in a single interaction, but across thousands of calls, those extra seconds add up and begin to shift overall performance metrics.
Metric impact: Across the queue, handle times begin to drift upward, overall productivity looks weaker on reports, and supervisors may increase coaching without realizing the core issue is technical.
Browser Updates Breaking WebRTC
Routine browser or softphone updates can disrupt microphone detection and voice routing. When this happens at scale, agents may struggle to connect audio properly, leading to rerouted calls, delays, and service desk tickets.
Metric impact: Service levels dip unexpectedly. Transfer volumes increase. IT ticket volume surges during peak periods.
Individually, these issues may seem minor. But collectively, they distort the very metrics leaders use to diagnose CX health. Without visibility into the audio layer, performance data tells an incomplete story, and teams often end up correcting the wrong problem.
Why QA Programs Rarely Identify Audio as the Root Cause
Traditional QA is built to review agent behavior, not the condition of the call itself. As a result, sound problems are often mistaken for performance issues instead of being identified as the root cause.
QA Prioritizes Behavior Over Environment
Quality assurance programs focus on scripts, empathy, compliance, and resolution steps. They evaluate what the agent says and how they say it, assuming the conversation itself is technically stable.
Audio Is Acknowledged, Not Investigated
If audio is clearly broken, it may get noted in passing. But intermittent issues such as latency, jitter, or brief dropouts are rarely systematically tracked or linked to broader performance trends.
Issues Get Framed as Agent Performance
When calls feel rushed, repetitive, or tense, QA often attributes it to listening skills or communication style. In reality, the agent may be compensating for degraded audio conditions.
Coaching Targets the Wrong Lever
Supervisors respond with behavioral coaching, slow down, clarify more, and confirm details. But coaching cannot fix network instability or device conflicts. Without recognizing audio as a root cause, teams end up treating symptoms rather than solving the problem.
Why Call Quality Should Be a Board-Level Metric
Call quality should not sit only in IT reports. It directly shapes customer experience, agent performance, and business results. If it affects AHT, CSAT, escalations, and repeat contacts, it belongs in leadership conversations.
Audio Is Infrastructure
Voice is not just a channel. It is the foundation of every call. If the sound layer is unstable, every conversation built on top of it is unstable too. Just like uptime or system performance, call quality supports everything else.
Infrastructure Failures Are a CX Risk
When sound breaks down, customers don’t blame infrastructure. They blame the brand. Poor audio increases frustration, lowers trust, and raises the chance of repeat calls. That makes it a customer experience risk, not just a technical issue.
Visibility Enables Ownership
If teams cannot see audio conditions clearly, no one owns the problem. Supervisors coach behavior. IT fixes tickets one by one. Leaders adjust staffing. But when call quality data is visible across teams, responsibility becomes clear and action becomes faster.
Real-Time Detection Reduces Escalation
Catching audio issues during the call changes the outcome. Agents can switch devices, reconnect, or reroute before frustration builds. Fixing problems in the moment prevents callbacks, complaints, and unnecessary escalations later.
When call quality is treated as an operational risk rather than background noise, it stops being a hidden variable and becomes a controllable one.
The Role of Audio Quality in Voice AI and Transcription Accuracy
As more contact centers bring AI into voice interactions, audio quality stops being a background issue. It becomes the base layer on which everything else depends.
Voice AI Depends on Clean Audio
Voice bots and virtual agents can only respond to what they clearly hear. If words drop, overlap, or sound unclear, the system may misunderstand the request.
That leads to repeated questions, wrong answers, or unnecessary transfers. What feels like an AI failure often starts as a sound problem.
Transcription Accuracy Also Depends on Clean Audio
Real-time transcription now powers summaries, routing decisions, analytics, and performance dashboards. If the audio is distorted, the transcript will be inaccurate. And when transcripts are wrong, reports, insights, and follow-up actions are built on flawed data.
As contact centers add more intelligence to the voice layer, they must strengthen the foundation beneath it. Otherwise, we’re building the future of CX on distorted sound.
Before investing in new AI tools, retraining agents, or redesigning workflows, leaders should fix the basics. Clear audio is not a technical detail. It is a customer experience decision.
If customers can’t clearly hear you, nothing else you optimize will matter.
