The WFH Agent Audio Setup

The single highest-leverage move is writing down what "acceptable audio" means before anyone is coached on it. Ours has three tiers, and the difference between them is deliberate: the minimum is enforceable, the expected tier is coachable, the ideal tier is aspirational and never punished.

Notice what's absent: no purchase requirements. If the program demands specific equipment, the program buys it — an audio standard that quietly taxes agents' wages is a resignation letter generator.

The environment fix that works is scheduling, not scolding. Most household noise is predictable — school runs, meal prep, deliveries, the neighbour's renovation hours. Ask agents to map their home's loud windows once, then do what WFM does best: put breaks and offline work inside those windows where the schedule allows. It costs nothing and removes the worst collisions. (Our night-shift crowd has the inverted version of this problem — keeping calls quiet at 3 a.m. is its own art.)

For everything unpredictable — the dog, the doorbell, the toddler jailbreak — the answer is a two-second mute reflex plus a software layer that removes the sound the caller would otherwise hear. We wrote up the pet chapter separately in The dog on the call, because it is genuinely the most common WFH noise event and deserves policy language, not eye-rolling.

Keep machine settings platform-agnostic and image them if you can. The rules that matter:

• One processor per direction. If a dedicated noise-cancellation layer runs, switch off the softphone's own suppression and any OS-level enhancement. Stacked processors produce the "underwater voice" QA keeps flagging.
• Fix the input device. Lock the softphone to the virtual device (if you run a software layer) or to the headset mic explicitly. "Default device" is how calls end up on laptop mics after every OS update.
• Set gain once, by test call. Two recorded test calls — one quiet room, one deliberately noisy — beat any meter. Keep mic distance consistent; distance drift is the most common cause of week-three quality decay.
• Kill notification audio on the work profile. The caller can hear your pings. All of them.

If you run a team, the software layer should be a company deployment, not an agent expense. The going rate for the dedicated call-center tier is public: Krisp's CC Core is listed at $15 per agent per month billed annually (verified 2026-09-20), covering agent-side and customer-side noise cancellation plus voice isolation — the full breakdown is in our Krisp for call centers guide, and the strategic picture in the main ops guide.

If you're an individual agent buying with your own card — common among freelance and gig-platform agents — Krisp's individual Meeting plans are the relevant aisle: as of 20 September 2026, a 7-day free trial, then Core at $16/month ($8/month billed annually). One honesty note: Krisp offered a free daily usage allowance for individuals for years, but as of our verification date the pricing page leads with the 7-day trial instead — so check the current terms yourself rather than trusting older articles (including anyone else's from 2025). Before spending anything, also ask your employer: many programs will license a tool that measurably cuts their QA escalations.

This is the paragraph we'd put in a remote-work agreement. Steal it, adapt it, and note the tone — it assumes good faith, because policies that assume bad faith create it:

Two implementation notes. First, the "company-provided" clause is load-bearing: requiring software you don't provide is the same wage-tax problem as requiring equipment. Second, the escalation ladder (schedule → eligibility) keeps team leads out of the impossible position of adjudicating whose baby is too loud.

• Headset plugged, softphone shows the right input device
• Noise-cancellation layer on and processing (most tools show a live indicator)
• Door closed, household pinged on shift start
• Notifications silenced on every device within mic range
• One breath. The queue can wait sixty seconds; the caller can't un-hear a chaotic first impression