Full Office Sound Masking
Challenge:
Blue Cross Blue Shield was concerned that noise distractions from conversational speech might increase due to the reduction in the number of private offices and fewer sound barriers such as walls and partitions in the 100-person cubicle space.
Call Centers deal with many noise complaints due to background noise. This ambient noise fluctuates, causing microphones to pick up unwanted conversations. To help mitigate noise, they needed to consider adding a pro sound masking solution to the office space to not limit employee production due to conversational distractions.
Sound masking is the process of adding an unobtrusive background noise to an environment to cover up excess speech noise through speakers installed in the ceiling. The emitters used are barely visible and can be set up to cover different types of zones.
Solutions:
The concept of sound masking is simple you generate a tone that is specifically engineered to the frequency of human speech and then raise ambient sound levels to make speech less intelligible and therefore less distracting.
This was accomplished by installing over 60 small and barely visible emitters in strategically placed locations in comparison to the cubicle layout using Cambridge Sound masking products.
These emitters are “daisy chained” over category cable and eventually make their way back to the intuitive sound masking generator. Once all installed, we fine-tuned the system to the environment and threw away the keys.
Blue Cross Blue Shield can now have their employees’ making calls throughout the day without the risk of overpowering each other. This was all done so the employees did not have to interact with the commissioned system as it works flawlessly in the background.
System:
Equipment used in the installation included:
Cambridge Sound Qt 100 sound masking generator: This was used as the heart of the full office sound masking system, as it allows the fine tuning and multiple zoning aspects of the system.
Cambridge Sound QT Emitters: These provide the ability to individually sound mask each employee area.
Cambridge Sound masking loudspeakers: These provided actual ambient noise adjustments to provide the perfect and less distracting working environment for employees.
The Impact:
With calls being placed continuously by the many employees in the center, eliminating background noise build up, and the noise created by their coworker’s calls had a huge impact on the productivity levels of the call center.
Multiple volume zones allowed the masking to be louder in the call center area, where conversations are more frequent, and didn’t take away from other collaborative conversations as employees moved around.
The pro sound masking solution also enabled employees to not notice the ambient sound masking or conversational noise distractions in the busy open office call center, and the client could not have been happier.
Metrics:
30%
increase in productivity due
to less ambient noise
