Some of the call centers provide service in more than one language. This happens in countries that have more than a single formal language or in call centers that provide offshore BPO service to many countries. In these call centers calls are conducted in parallel in many languages. In this post we will not discuss workforce or call distribution challenges in such multilingual call centers but we would like to explore the uniqueness of ambient noise in these call centers.

A known phenomena is that call centers are very noisy. A customer that calls a call center might hear not only the primary agent with him he or she is speaking but also nearby agents like the agent sitting on the left, the agent sitting on the right and maybe even the supervisor giving instructions. The fact that a call center is a multilingual call center does not change the level of ambient voices from any other call center but the impact on the customer might be a bit different since now the customer hears not only human voices in a language he or she is familiar with but also voices in foreign languages that he or she is not familiar with and cannot understand. Let’s analyze two aspects of the multilingual noise: security/privacy and user experience.

From security or privacy point of view, a multilingual noise has a small advantage over a regular call center. When a customer overhears ambient voices, he is potentially exposed to private data of other customers or to sensitive information like a commercial offer that is being provided to another customer. But, if the ambient voices are in a language that the customer does not understand, then the risk of leakage of private & sensitive information is reduced as the customer will not be able to understand the ambient voices that he overhears.

From customer experience point of view, a multilingual noise worsen the result. To start with, hearing ambient voices has a very negative impact on CX but when these ambient voices are also in a foreign language it will increase the sense of alienation. As a result the customers will more likely complain about the quality of service they are getting and will hold a bad impression on organization.

Noise in call centers is a significant problems. It reduces customer experience, causes leakage of private and sensitive data and reduces the accuracy of voice analytics like speech to text and emotion detection. In a multilingual call centers the impact of ambient voices become worse from CX point of view.

A solution to this problem is very simple and does not require purchasing any hardware or making any change in the infrastructure. Our Noise Firewall is a software solution that in real time correlates the audio of all calls, regardless their language, identifies the source of noise and removes it from the calls.