Speech Clarity: The Foundation for CX, Compliance, and AI Success
Enterprises have spent years modernizing CX, scaling AI, and optimizing contact centers. But one overlooked capability continues to erode value across every interaction: speech clarity.
Speech remains the fastest, most trusted channel, especially in high-emotion, high-stakes moments. Yet many organizations still treat clarity as a technical metric, rather than as a driver of customer trust, compliance, and automation outcomes. The costs — from repeat calls and agent burnout to compliance gaps and corrupted AI training data — are often unmeasured but material.
ISG’s research shows that clarity is no longer just a call-center issue. It’s evolving into a foundational input layer for enterprise performance.
Read on for ISG’s perspective on why speech is being reframed as infrastructure — and download the full whitepaper, The Clarity Advantage: How Speech Understanding Powers CX, Compliance, and AI Performance, for case studies and the Speech Clarity Maturity Framework.
From Cost Center to Performance Driver
Speech remains the most direct and trusted interface between brands and customers. It carries more than just words, it communicates urgency, emotion, intent, and trust with a richness digital channels struggle to match. Even in a digital-first world, 75% of customers still prefer phone calls when they need support.
Yet in many organizations, speech is still treated as a legacy cost center, which is managed for efficiency, not impact. It’s optimized for call handling, not for clarity.
Clarity is where operational performance either compounds or collapses. Whether through accent variation, poor audio quality, multilingual interaction, or background noise, unclear speech affects far more than call quality — it undermines business outcomes.
The result? Higher repeat volumes, lower customer satisfaction, agent fatigue, and AI systems trained on unreliable inputs.
According to ISG’s 2024 BPO Market Lens research, customer satisfaction, first-contact resolution, and customer retention remain top enterprise priorities. All three outcomes hinge on one capability: the ability to clearly understand and be understood — the first condition for resolution, compliance, and trust.
And as AI adoption accelerates, clarity is becoming even more critical. ISG data shows that AI is now being deployed in CX more than nearly any other enterprise domain.
Why Clarity Is Moving Up the Enterprise Agenda
Many CX transformation efforts continue to deprioritize speech clarity, treating it as a network-level issue measured in latency or jitter rather than a systemic enabler of business performance. When clarity is not addressed as a foundational capability, organizations risk missing its full potential to enhance experience, performance, and risk mitigation.
This gap between technical quality and conversational clarity has material consequences. Across contact centers, compliance functions, and AI systems, unclear speech contributes to operational drag, regulatory exposure, and customer churn — costs that are rarely tracked directly, but tend to compound over time.
Leading enterprises are beginning to reframe speech from a support function to a clarity-driven capability with material impact across the business.
As shown in Exhibit 2, this shift involves more than better headsets or noise suppression. It’s about treating clarity as infrastructure, built into the voice layer, embedded in compliance and AI pipelines, and designed to reduce friction across every spoken interaction.
Embedding Clarity Into CX, Compliance, and AI
ISG’s analysis makes one thing clear: clarity is infrastructure. Enterprises that continue treating speech as a cost center will face compounding costs, from repeat calls and attrition to compliance risk and underperforming AI. But those that embed clarity into their CX transformation, compliance strategy, and AI initiatives will unlock faster resolution, stronger compliance, more inclusive service delivery, and higher-quality speech data for automation.
As clarity gains traction, ISG expects more enterprises to embed it into how they serve, scale, and automate — positioning it not as a peripheral enhancement, but as the foundation for end-to-end performance improvement.
Download The Clarity Advantage whitepaper to see the full analysis, ISG’s Speech Clarity Maturity Framework, and case studies from leading enterprises.
