6 Ways to Reduce Background Noise in Office VOIP Calls

Smiling handsome customer support operator agent making VOIP calls on a nice headset with a good quality microphone with hands-free device working in call center

The quality and clarity of VoIP calls, along with the features available makes the service a viable solution compared to traditional phone lines.

The incredible sound quality provided by modern VOIP calls has been commented on many times. The internet is now capable of conveying sound at as high or higher quality than landline telephones with no loss in detail along the way. However, just as HD tv allows you to see the pores of actors, high-quality phone calls suddenly reveal just how noisy your office really is.

Surely, you’ve heard the hum of fans and the murmur of coworkers on a call when another caller opens their mic to speak. No doubt, that same kind of office background noise can be heard on many professional calls. The good news is that there are several ways to reduce the background noise in VOIP calls without making the office a ‘quiet zone’. Here’s how:

1) Hand Out Quality Headsets

First, get every employee who makes VOIP calls on a nice headset with a good quality microphone. The headsets will ensure two things. First, that employees aren’t using their speakers to hear calls, adding to the noise and potential for call-echo. Second, a good quality microphone will be better at picking up only the speaker’s voice without picking up every rustle of paper or keyboard clack in a shared office space.

2) Reduce Fan Noise

Fan noise is a serious problem in office, big or small. The sound of your HVAC or the box fans you use to keep cool in spite of the HVAC can have a hugely negative effect on your call audio quality. That hum and rattle can be heard on an open mic and can make an entire conference call less pleasant. Do everything you can to reduce the noise fans make in rooms where calls occur.

This might involve repairing or updating your HVAC fans, replacing or cleaning your floor fans, or replacing noisy fans with modern quieter versions of same. Loud printers fall under the same rule.

3) Make Use of Noise Reduction Panels

Noise reduction panels are attractive pieces of wall art or subtly integrated pieces of furniture designed for offices to soak up that ambient sound. noise reduction uses a combination of foam and fabric to ‘catch’ noises as they pass and muffle them so that they cannot be heard at a distance. They can be used to create privacy, quiet spots, and simply to reduce the amount of noise that travels from one section of the office to the other. The more you decorate or build with noise reduction panels, the quieter your office can potentially become.

4) Hold Calls in Quiet Offices

If calls are an occasional but not constant feature in your office, then providing quiet offices may be enough. Allow employees to book or borrow the spare quiet rooms available in your office so that they can hold their occasional calls and conferences in audio privacy. This way, the murmur of coworkers or the hum of big-room HVAC vents will not reduce the quality of their calls.

5) Provide ‘Cone of Silence’ Desk Hutches

If you have an open workspace full of employees who are constantly making calls (or don’t have spare quiet offices) then an interesting alternative is to build sound-privacy hutches out of noise reduction panels. These hutches can even fold away and then be brought out when it’s time to make a call. Essentially, these hutches act as portable ‘cones of silence’ so that when an employee pops their head into the hutch, suddenly office noise is reduced and they are audibly alone with the call.

6) Fluffy Plantlife

Finally, never discount the value of fluffy plants. Cubicle hedgerows, walls of flowering vines, and other office greenery are great ways to absorb sound. Plants not only make people happy and improve the air quality, the fluffy leaves also catch sound and prevent it from wandering too far across the room. In combination with noise reduction panels, you might be surprised how quiet an open workspace can become.

Improving the audio quality of VOIP calls is about much more than bandwidth. By mastering the ambient noise in your office, you can ensure that every employee can make crystal-clear calls with their new VOIP numbers without offending or deafening their contacts with background sounds. For more VOIP insights on how to optimize unified communications for your business, contact us today!

The office VoIP network

An office phone network, whether it’s based on traditional or VoIP technology, is called a private branch exchange or PBX. The Internet version is called an IPBX. Its central equipment can be in the office, in a remote data center, or in the cloud. VoIP phones are connected to the PBX over data connections such as Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Sometimes the phones use the same local network as the computers; sometimes they use a separate network for more consistent quality.

Either way, your phone converts what you say into data and sends it to the IPBX, which is really just a server running specialized software. If the equipment is based in your office, your call goes out onto the public telephone system when it leaves the building. If it’s cloud-based, your voice may travel almost the entire distance as data, saving the cost of a long-distance call.

The conversion to data uses compression techniques, so the bandwidth needed for one conversation isn’t very high. If an office has a lot of phones, though, it needs to have enough bandwidth to let many conversations keep up and should have a router with VoIP-friendly features.

You may have heard of VoIP phones referred to as SIP phones. SIP is one of two common protocols for making VoIP connections. The other is called H.323. The phone has to be compatible with the protocol your exchange uses, but phones from different manufacturers for the same protocol are interchangeable.

You don’t actually have to give up your old phone. Devices called Analog Telephone Adapters (ATAs) let you plug in one or more ordinary telephones and convert their audio signals to data. It’s less expensive than buying VoIP phones, but not all the features are available.

What happens when you make a call?

When you place a call, you might hear touch tones, but they’re just to give a sense of familiarity. The keys you press are converted to data, and the exchange determines whether you’re making an in-office call or outside call. If the call is within the IPBX’s area, it handles the whole connection. It isn’t restricted to voice data in this case; many IPBXs can carry video and documents as well. The ability to combine these is called “Unified Communication.”

If the call goes through a cloud-based service, it may emerge on the public telephone network only at a point local to the receiving party — possibly in another nation. If you’re calling another VoIP exchange, the call may not have to go over the public network at all. Sending data is very inexpensive, so VoIP calls cost much less than regular long-distance calls.

To get a clean-sounding conversation, you need an Internet connection that has enough bandwidth and will move the data along at a consistent speed. A poor connection may sound choppy, parts of the conversation may drop out, or you may hear an echo. Equipment which is designed to deliver “QoS” (quality of service) for voice data will reduce the incidence of problems.

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