The Barrier Hiding in Plain Sight in Your Contact Centre: Background Noise and Hearing Loss
By Daniel Morgan-Williams, Founding Director, Visualise Training and Consultancy Ltd
When an agent with hearing loss starts struggling on calls, the instinctive fix most employers reach for is a louder headset. It seems logical. If someone can’t hear well, turn the volume up. I understand why this is the default response, but it’s usually the wrong one, and it can genuinely make things worse.
Hearing aids and amplified headsets don’t discriminate between the sounds you want and the sounds you don’t. They make everything louder: the customer’s voice, yes, but also the ambient hum of a busy floor, the agent two desks along closing a call, the printer, the general wash of forty other conversations happening at once. Turning up the volume on a headset in a noisy open-plan environment doesn’t isolate the customer’s voice, it amplifies the whole room along with it. For someone with hearing loss, that can mean more strain, not less, because now they’re working harder to separate a louder signal from an equally louder mess of noise around it.
This matters more in contact centres than almost anywhere else, because the entire job depends on one channel: sound, arriving through a headset, in a room full of other people doing exactly the same thing. Get the response wrong here and you’re not making a small inconvenience worse, you’re making the core task of the job harder.
The effort nobody sees
In the workplace assessments I carry out, one of the things I try hardest to get employers to understand is listening effort. It’s the mental work involved in extracting meaning from sound when the incoming signal isn’t clean, whether that’s because of hearing loss, background noise, or usually both together.
An agent with hearing loss can sound completely fine on a call. They can hit their handle times, resolve the query, sound professional and unhurried. What a manager or a QA reviewer doesn’t see is the concentration it took to get there: the constant, low-level work of filling in gaps, cross-checking what was heard against what makes sense in context, and staying alert in case the next sentence is the one that doesn’t quite land clearly. That effort doesn’t show up in call metrics. It shows up later, in fatigue that builds across a shift, and it’s easy for it to be invisible right up until someone burns out or their accuracy starts slipping for reasons nobody around them understands.
This isn’t about someone struggling to do their job. Most agents with hearing loss are entirely capable of doing the work well. The point is that “coping” and “coping without cost” are different things, and only one of them is sustainable across a full working week.
Headsets are not one size fits all
A standard-issue headset is designed for an average user in an average environment, and neither of those things describes most contact centres or most agents. Noise-cancelling headsets can help enormously for some people, cutting the ambient floor noise before it ever reaches the ear. For others, particularly those who rely on hearing aids, what matters more is telecoil compatibility, which allows sound to be transmitted directly to the hearing aid rather than competing with it. Bone conduction headsets, which send sound through vibration rather than through the ear canal, suit a different group again, often people for whom conventional headphones interact badly with hearing aids or implants.
There isn’t a single “best” option here. What works brilliantly for one agent can be actively unhelpful for another with a different type or degree of hearing loss. This is exactly why it needs individual assessment rather than a policy decision made once and applied to everyone. Issuing the same standard headset across the board because it’s simpler for procurement is understandable, but it treats hearing loss as a single, uniform condition, when in practice it’s highly individual in both cause and impact.
Technology that helps, used properly
Real-time transcription and live captioning tools have genuinely changed what’s possible for some agents with hearing loss, giving them a text backup running alongside the audio so a missed word or muddled phrase can be checked rather than guessed at. I’ve seen this technology make a real difference to accuracy and confidence when it’s set up properly.
The key phrase there is “set up properly.” Captioning bolted onto a system as an afterthought, with no attention to latency, accuracy of the transcription engine, or how it displays alongside the customer’s live record, can add as much cognitive load as it removes. It becomes another stream of information to monitor rather than a genuine support. Like headsets, it needs to be matched to the person and the way they actually work, not issued as a blanket solution because it looks good on a company’s accessibility policy.
Rethink what “asking someone to repeat” means
Most call quality scoring systems include some version of a penalty for asking a customer to repeat information. It makes sense as a general rule. Repeated requests can signal an agent who isn’t listening properly, and that’s worth catching.
But that scoring logic was built with one type of agent in mind, and it was never designed to distinguish between someone who wasn’t paying attention and someone with hearing loss who is asking a customer to repeat or confirm a detail as a deliberate, accurate way of working. For the second agent, that request isn’t a failure of listening. It’s the strategy that makes their listening effective. Scoring it as a fault penalises the very behaviour that keeps their accuracy high.
Targets don’t have to move, definitions do
None of this means lowering the bar. Accuracy still matters, call quality still matters, and nobody benefits from pretending otherwise, least of all agents with hearing loss, who generally want to be judged on the same standard as everyone else.
What needs to change is the definition sitting underneath the target. A scoring framework that treats every repeat-request as equivalent, regardless of why it happened, isn’t measuring what it thinks it’s measuring. Build in the distinction between a listening failure and a listening strategy, and the target stays exactly where it was. What changes is whether the system can actually tell the difference between the two, which it currently can’t.
At Visualise Training and Consultancy Ltd, we carry out specialist hearing loss workplace assessments for contact centre employers, helping them understand what will genuinely help a particular agent do their job well, rather than defaulting to generic equipment or a one-size-fits-all fix.
Daniel Morgan-Williams is Founding Director of Visualise Training and Consultancy Ltd.
He writes from both professional experience supporting organisations with sensory loss in the workplace, and his own lived experience of visual impairment.
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