People talk 45% longer with Skype high audio quality

Here's a slide from Skype's Jonathan Rosenberg eComm presentation. Skype tested a large pool of users from all over the world for customer satisfaction based on the audio codec they used in a Skype-to-Skype call.

In the chart to the left the Mean Opinion Score rose from 3.4 using mobile phone audio quality to about 3.85 with Skype's highest quality, a thirteen percent jump.

On the right Skype shows the effect of call quality on average call duration. With the lowest quality, the average call lasted about 21.5 minutes. At the highest quality it went about 31 minutes, 45% longer.

One of my fellow eComm'rs noted both scores rose from wideband to superwideband. Notable because you may not be able to tell the difference if asked.

Fidelity clearly counts.

Imagine a meeting between Skype and Verizon.

Hey, Vee.

Hi, Spyke. Our customers are speaking for only three minutes fifteen seconds on each call. And that number's falling. What can you do for us?

Our callers speak for twenty minutes when they experience audio comparable to your crappy standard audio. Maybe if we get our users Skyping on your phones, they'll start talking longer?

Cool. And for when we roll out our 4G network?

Oh, then Skypers talk even longer: for more than half an hour. You just need to be running our superwideband SILK codec on your handsets.

Audio fidelity changes consumer behavior.

tags: skype, silk, quality, stats