Contact centers are noisy locations and suffer from significant ambient noise. One of the most noisy locations in the call center is the cubic of the supervisors (a.k.a the team leaders). What exactly happens in the supervisor’s cubic that causes so much noise? In many cases the supervisor is not on a call but has to monitor the activity of all the agents. He or She gives instructions to the agents, motivate them and sometimes correct their actions. Although theoretically these activities could be done quietly using an on-line messaging system, in practice the voice of the supervisor is heard loud and clear in the call center. Should this voice be considered as noise?

The supervisor is raising his/her voice in order to be heard by the agents, therefore from this perspective the voice of the supervisor should not be considered as noise and should be heard by the agents. On the other hand, the voice of the supervisor is surely not intended to be heard by the customers that are now talking over the phone with the agents. The customers should not hear sentences like “one more hour left to reach our daily sales target” or “change of interest rate will take effect shortly”. From customer perspective these sentences are noise and they surely reduce user experience.

Now, that we understand that the supervisor’s voice is noise and should be removed from the phone call the question is how this could be done? The biggest challenge in this case is to identify that a human voice belongs to the supervisor and not to the primary agent that is now talking with the customer. The inherent problem is that both the agent’s voice and the supervisor’s voice are human voices and there is no way to distinguish between them unless there is some knowledge about the physical location from which each voice is coming from.

This “magic” can be done by correlating the audio of multiple calls in the contact center, building a Noise Map of the call center and identify the location of each voice. For more information take a look at our NOISE FIREWALL. The Noise Firewall identifies the exact physical location of each human voice that is heard and therefore it can remove the supervisor’s voice in addition to the voices of other agents in the background. One might ask himself how will the Noise Firewall be able to correlate the supervisor’s voice if this supervisor is not during a phone call. The answer is simple. There is usually no problem to identifying the supervisor’s voice since there are many phones in the call center to compensate on the absence of the supervisor’s phone and in the rare cases we still want to get the supervisor’s voice directly, the Noise Firewall supports working directly and automatically with a dummy soft-phone on the supervisor’s desktop.

To summarize this post, if you want to cancel ambient human voices including the supervisor’s voice from phone calls in your call centers, contact the experts that have a proven track record in this field. For more information including case studies contact us.