# Voice call quality issues

Bad audio, dropped calls, awkward delays. Here's what causes them and what to do.

## What you might experience

* The agent's voice sounds robotic, jittery, or cuts in and out.
* There are long pauses between what you say and what the agent says back.
* The call drops or disconnects partway through.
* You can't hear the agent at all, or the agent can't hear you.
* The agent talks over you.

## Why voice quality varies

Our voice agent is delivered through ElevenLabs over a regular phone call, so the usual phone-call factors apply:

* **Your phone signal.** Weak cell signal causes choppy audio.
* **Your network.** WiFi calling and VoIP services are sensitive to network issues.
* **Carrier routing.** Some long-distance routes have more latency than others.
* **The phone itself.** Older phones with small speakers or microphones may struggle.
* **Voice-AI latency.** There can be a short delay between the end of your sentence and the agent's response because the audio is being transcribed, classified, and synthesized.

## What to try

### 1. Move to a place with better signal

For cell calls, stepping outside or moving to a window often helps.

### 2. Hang up and have us call back

Tell the agent: "The audio is bad — can you call me back?" The agent will end the call and the system will schedule a fresh attempt. The new call may route through a different path with better quality.

### 3. Switch to the portal

The portal handles everything calls handle — payments, plans, disputes, messaging — without involving a phone call. If voice keeps being a problem, the portal is reliable.

### 4. Email instead

If you'd rather handle things in writing, tell the agent and we will follow up over email.

### 5. Use a different phone

If the issue is consistent and your phone is older or has a known speaker / mic issue, try from a different phone.

## When the agent can't hear you

Common causes:

* **Phone is muted.** Check the mute button.
* **Microphone covered.** Make sure nothing is over the bottom of the phone.
* **Bluetooth issue.** If you're on a Bluetooth headset, try removing it.
* **Speakerphone in a noisy room.** Background noise can drown out your voice.

If none of that helps, end the call and have it placed again, or switch to the portal.

## When the agent talks over you

The agent's voice-activity detection sometimes misreads a pause as the end of your sentence — especially over a speakerphone in a noisy room or with an unfamiliar accent. Workarounds:

* Slow down and pause clearly between thoughts.
* Move to a quieter environment.
* Switch to the portal.

We are actively improving voice-activity detection. These cases are not your fault.

## How to report a quality issue

There is no in-portal "Report a problem with this call" button today — that's planned but not yet shipped. For now:

* After a bad call, [contact support](/troubleshooting/contact-support.md).
* Include roughly when the call happened, the phone number it came from, and what went wrong (robotic audio, dropped, agent couldn't hear you, etc.).

Behind the scenes, our QA pipeline runs a post-call scorecard on every call, so we already have some visibility into quality — but a direct report from you is the most useful signal for individual incidents.

## What we do with these reports

* Pattern reports (e.g. "every call from this number is bad") are escalated for engineering.
* Repeated quality issues on a single account may trigger a switch to email-only outreach.

***

Last reviewed: 2026-05-24 by Support Lead.


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