Call Center Management: Cost Analysis for Executives and the Bottom Line Impact
Good customer service drives higher revenue, happier customers, and lowers churn. Your contact center is a business powerhouse. Still, contact center leaders struggle to prove the value of their business unit to execs. In fact, leaders like you say the lack of understanding and respect for the contact center is a top challenge this year.
Download Now: Prove your contact center’s value with the 9 business impacts of a better agent experience.
Exec teams give buying power to the departments who can show the most return. So, it’s up to you to convince your C-suite why the contact center is a mission-critical business unit. And, why investing in the contact center can catapult your business forward.
How you manage your contact center and develop your agents has a direct impact on customer outcomes and your bottom line. It’s time to break down your call center management by the numbers to see how you’re adding value each day.
1. Good customer service doesn’t just save revenue, it generates it.
Anywhere from 25% to 40% of your company’s total revenue comes from returning customers.
And, another 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service.
How you nurture and maintain customer relationships impacts how you grow organizational revenue. Customer happiness (and the loyalty that follows) is key to raising revenue standards.
2. The service your team delivers influences brand loyalty and future buying decisions.
Some 70% of customers say seamless customer service interactions impact their purchasing power. Customers seek out companies that know their history. They crave interactions that use context from previous conversations to personalize their experience. And more than half of Americans have scrapped a planned purchase because of a poor service experience.
3. Coaching your agents improves the quality of service they provide.
When you manage your team by coaching them, you’re showing agents that you’ll listen to them. And when an agent is listened to, they feel valued and empowered. Research from the Dean Sydney Business School, University of Wollongong, shows manager coaching leads to improvements in productivity, engagement and customer service. In fact, in one case, customer service improved by 450% within five months of introducing manager coaching.
Investing in your employees pays dividends. And, when you coach often to bring clarity to goals, expectations and performance, agents know where to improve. And, they enjoy doing it.
4. Workforce optimization & engagement leads to higher productivity that drives money-saving metrics.
Many business leaders view the contact center as a cost center. If you can drive productivity up, and costs down, then you’re running a lean, mean contact center machine.
But not every business leader views the contact center through the lens of the manager. The way to drive performance up and keep costs at bay isn’t to trim budgets and cut hours. You need to empower your employees. And, you need to set clear goals and performance standards. Then, you can help agents optimize their time at work.
With the right tools, cost-saving metrics like Average Handle Time and FCR get a boost. In fact, a friend of ours recently told us that after moving to an at-home environment, with the right tools and agent support, they dropped AHT by 4% in a few weeks. That 4% drop equated to a projected $760k in annual recovered cash.
5. Investing in your employees upfront leads to higher agent retention (and fewer costs associated with churn).
Coaching your agents lowers the risk for burnout. When agents feel supported in their roles, and when they know their value, it takes less emotional labor to do their jobs. Investing in agent training, coaching and development paths for your team – core functions of your job – slims down agent burnout.
And, when you limit burnout, you cut agent attrition. If a 100-seat contact center reduces agent attrition by only 5%, you can add anywhere from $176-$600k back to your bottom line.
6. Engaged employees save companies millions in lost productivity costs.
Actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. economy $483 billion to $605 billion each year in lost productivity.
What’s more? Agents who navigate between 3-5 screens per day spend about 10-20% their time searching for info while handling customer interactions. Wasting that much time plunges agent productivity (and engagement). In a 250-seat contact center, wasting 10-20% of an agent’s time equates to wasting $875k – $1.8M in FTE costs (based on the average $35k salary of an agent).
Agent productivity (and engagement) largely falls on the laps of managers and contact center leaders. It’s up to you to connect your agents to purpose. Clue them in on their metrics and goals and keep them updated on progress towards those goals.
When you flip the switch on agent productivity and engagement, you ditch thousands in pointless costs from wasted time. And along with it, your other business outcomes skyrocket, too. Companies with employees in Gallup’s top quartile of engagement see 10% higher customer outcomes, a 17% bump in productivity, 20% higher sales, and 21% more profits.
7. Streamlining your contact center tech leads to less wasted time and happier, more efficient agents.
Companies with a unified tech stack are 131% more likely to outperform their business goals. But today, some 92% of agents say their agent-facing applications could be more effective.
Research tells us that clunky, disjointed tools are driving up your agent attrition rates. According to Gartner’s Future of Customer Service Workforce Engagement Report, consolidating your systems and lessening the burden on your agents is one of the biggest factors to influence your agent’s decision to stay on board (or leave) your company.
When you link better tech with all the other pieces of your managerial puzzle, you raise contact center performance and outcomes. Streamlining your tech to make your agents’ daily work easier leads to gains in CX outcomes, too. A decade of data out of Glassdoor tells us – happier employees do, in fact, lead to happier customers.
Your impact on your company’s bottom line can’t be denied. The next time you need exec buy-in, use these data-backed facts to prove all the contact center brings to the table.