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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Call center

Acoustic panels for call centers: the complete guide

What makes call centers noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Fewer mis-heard calls and less fatigue for agents. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In call centers the main sound sources are dozens of voices at once, and the most common complaints are that customers hear other agents in the background, agents raise their voices to be heard, and that noise fatigue by the end of a shift.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical call center of 80 × 50 ft with a 10 ft ceiling has a volume of about 40,000 ft³. With typical surfaces (drywall, a rug and some furniture), its echo time is about 1.85 seconds. The target for call centers is 0.50 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for call centers.

The recommended starting point

For a call center like the one above, we suggest about 266 24 × 48 in rectangular ceiling tile, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.50 s. That is roughly 82% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for call centers is about 30% on walls and 70% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our call center solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for call centers.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for call centers