Contact centres are commonly viewed as cost centres for the enterprise, using resources, real estate and labour without a direct impact on revenue generation. Because of this, contact centre managers are always under pressure to make operations more efficient, lean, and cut down on waste. One of the best ways to approach this is by lowering your cost per call.
What is Cost Per Call?
As we discussed in a previous article, cost per call is the average expense you incur for every call that you take. If your revenue per call is higher than your cost per call metric, it means that the contact centre is running on the right side of profitability.
8 Tips for Reducing Cost Per Call
- Eliminate unnecessary hiring expenses - Labour comprises 70-73% of your total costs per call, and a new agent can take $10K-$20K to onboard. Invest in employee engagement to avoid attrition and unnecessary hiring expenses
- Study call recordings to find inefficiencies - The more calls your contact centre processes, the laser will be your cost per call average. Study historical call recordings to find blind spots in agent performance – e.g., if time is wasted on gathering the same information over and over again
- Train agents on first-time-resolution - If queries are resolved at the very first interaction, it will reduce the time spent on the same customer, thereby freeing up agents to address more queries, engage with new customers, and lower average costs by driving up revenues
- Integrate your contact centre systems - 94% of contact centres prioritise integration, as it saves agents the time and effort of switching between different apps, entering duplicate data, and navigating multiple systems
- Leverage cloud-based software - Cloud-based contact centres can save you much as 27% of costs, compared to on-premise systems. This is because the cloud does not require fixed resources and can accommodate flexible payments
- Diversify your channel mix - While telephony remains integral to customer service, there are other, more cost-optimised options. You can route some of the queries to a web-based live chat interface, as it can be 17-30% cheaper than telephonic interactions
- Use predictive routing and dialling systems - Predictive auto-diallers and ACDs automatically match an inbound/outbound customer with the perfect agent. This means shorter queues, fewer delays, and less idle time in your contact centre
- Explore labour arbitrage opportunities - Sometimes, switching to the best-cost location can save you significantly in opex. Methodologies like contact centre outsourcing and follow the sun shifts can help gain from labour arbitrage opportunities
One Last #ProTip: Focus on the Top Line Rather than Your Bottom Line
Bottom line savings are definitely necessary, but you can only lower cost-per-call so far before it leads to a trade-off in quality. Instead, it can be a smarter idea to focus on increasing top-line revenues, by training agents on the basics of FTR, upselling, cross-selling, customer engagement, etc., to increase lifetime value and drive referrals. This will offset whatever labour costs you undertake to upskill your workforce, thereby deriving more value from every call.