The contact centre agent who keeps asking customers to repeat themselves:The contact centre agent who keeps asking customers to repeat themselves: performance problem, or hearing? Visualise Training and Consultancy
Daniel Morgan-Williams, Founding Director, Visualise Training and Consultancy Ltd
Picture a good contact centre agent who has started to slip. Her handling times are creeping up. Her quality scores show she is asking customers to repeat themselves, and one call review notes that she answered a question that nobody had asked. She has stopped chatting in the breaks. She says she is tired. Her team leader, who likes her, starts to wonder whether she has lost interest in the job.
Now picture the same woman at home in the evening, with the television louder than it used to be, wondering how long she can keep hiding it. A contact centre is very nearly the hardest place there is to hide a hearing problem. The whole job is listening, through a headset, to a stranger who may be speaking quickly, from a poor line, with a busy room behind you.
It is more common than most managers think
RNID states that there are 9 million working-age people in the UK with some degree of hearing loss, on a page last updated in October 2026. The wider estimate is 18 million people across all ages, from a 2024 paper by Professors Akeroyd and Munro published in the International Journal of Audiology, which RNID adopted in place of its earlier figure of 12 million. Not everyone in those numbers is struggling at work, and many have hearing aids. But in any contact centre of a reasonable size, it would be surprising if nobody had some degree of hearing loss.
What it can look like on the floor
Hearing loss at work rarely announces itself. More often it looks like a pattern. Customers are asked to repeat their name, account number or postcode. Calls take longer, or end abruptly because the agent has lost the thread. Answers are slightly off the question. The agent turns the headset volume to maximum, or presses one earpiece harder to the ear. Quality scores fall on listening and accuracy. In a busy room, the agent may start to avoid certain call types, or the team, because it is easier than explaining.
None of those signs proves anything, and a manager should not guess at a cause. But every one of them is also an ordinary performance indicator, and that is the risk. A process opened on the strength of those signs, without anyone asking whether the person can hear the calls clearly, may be addressing the wrong problem.
Struggling in silence
Hearing loss is easy to hide and hard to admit. People nod, guess from context, and ask for a repeat only when they absolutely must. I could not find published research on why contact centre agents in particular keep a hearing difficulty to themselves, so what follows is reasoning, not findings.
A person may worry that admitting they struggle to hear calls will be read as saying they cannot do the job. They may fear for their shifts, their bonus or their place in the team. Because hearing often declines gradually, they may not yet have accepted it themselves. And they may not know that adjustments exist at all. People often do not know what they do not know, so they cannot ask for what they have never heard of. The result is an agent who works harder and harder to keep up, and says nothing.
When a capability process starts for the wrong reason
Performance and capability procedures exist for good reasons, and the managers who use them are usually trying to be fair. The difficulty comes when a process is opened before anyone has asked whether a health condition or disability might be behind the figures.
An agent who cannot hear calls clearly may be set targets that the current set-up makes very hard to meet, placed on a plan that measures the symptom and not the cause, and put under pressure to do more of the very thing that is difficult. That is bad for the person. It is also bad for the business, which may lose an experienced agent and face a dispute that a single early conversation could have avoided.
Under the Equality Act 2010, an employer has a duty to make reasonable adjustments where a disabled person would otherwise be at a substantial disadvantage, and that duty can arise where the employer knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, about the disability. What is reasonable depends on the circumstances, including the size of the organisation and the cost. A person with hearing loss may be covered. This is general information, not legal advice.
It is also worth being clear about what an adjustments assessment is for. It does not decide whether anyone is capable. It looks at what is getting in the way, and what could be changed.
A different question from acoustic shock
Contact centres will know the debate about acoustic shock, where agents report symptoms after a sudden loud sound through a headset. The Health and Safety Executive says it has not been established whether the reported symptoms are caused directly by exposure to these sounds, and it encourages management to record any incidents that are reported. That is a separate question from the one here. An agent who is struggling to hear a normal call is not necessarily reacting to a loud one, and the two should not be confused.
Reasonable adjustments in practice
The right adjustments depend on the person and the type of hearing loss, so they are worth assessing rather than guessing. Options that employers commonly consider include a headset with proper volume control and clear sound, a headset or set-up that works with the person’s hearing aids, a quieter seating position away from the busiest part of the floor, and screens or other measures to reduce background noise.
Written or on-screen support, such as live captions on calls where that is possible, can reduce the pressure. So can small changes to targets and quality scoring, so that a person is not penalised for the time it takes to confirm what they have heard. Agreeing a way to flag a poor line, and how the team should handle it, can also help. Many of these changes are small, and some can be in place within a day. Others need a proper look at the person, the workstation and the telephony system together.
What a workplace assessment adds
This is the work we do at Visualise Training and Consultancy Ltd. A hearing loss workplace assessment looks at the person’s role, their working environment and their equipment together, starting from their own account of what is difficult. It produces written, practical recommendations. It is a workplace adjustments report, not a medical report, and it does not offer a view on capability, fitness for work or prognosis.
An assessment can be carried out virtually, and urgent cases can usually be prioritised if they are flagged at referral. The report goes to the referrer, who shares it with the employee, and the employer then decides with the employee what is reasonable. For an employer, it gives something concrete to act on, and a clear record that support was considered. For the agent, it can be the first time anyone has asked what would make the job easier.
A first conversation
If a team leader suspects hearing loss is behind a change in performance, the first step is a kind and private conversation, not a process. Ask how the person is finding the calls. Ask whether the headset, the room or the line is making things harder. Ask what would help. If the answer is that they are struggling to hear, the next step is to find out what they need, and to put support in place quickly.
The agent in this article may not exist. But somewhere in your centre, someone is probably working harder than anyone knows to hear what the customer is saying. A single question from a manager who cares can change that.
If you or someone in your team has hearing loss and would like expert, tailored support to stay productive and comfortable at work, Click Here to arrange a hearing loss workplace assessment.
