How well do you look after your customers? Most companies probably think they do a good job, but the addition of technology into large, national call centers has caused many organizations to focus on technology solutions as opposed to people solutions.

• 1. If your call center uses a feature where a customer can leave a number where they can be reached by the next available customer service representative, turn it off and hire more customer service representatives.
• 2. A call center manager must rely on technology to track important statistics like the amount of time a customer waits on hold. Any time greater than one minute should be considered to be inadequate. By monitoring these statistics, priority can be given to improving staffing levels.
  
  
  
• 3. If your first point of contact with your customer is having a recorded message telling them how important their call is, you may want to look at changing the message. If their call was important, it would be immediately answered by a real person - not a computer.
• 4. If your marketing team suggests that a marketing campaign should be created around a “focus” or “commitment” to customer service, laugh at them and tell them they should take the marketing money allocated for that campaign and spend it on actually improving customer service.
• 5. Here’s a great idea. If your company sends invoices or bills to your customers, reduce the amount of calls to the call center by simplifying the bills. Bills that are too confusing are a leading cause of calls into a busy call center.
• 6. Make your executives and managers spend a day in the seat of a customer service representative. Give them a good idea of the challenges that are faced by your front-line workers.

Traditional ROI calculations use the level of profit generated by an asset divided by the value of the asset and expressed as a percentage. That’s fine but when we seek to ascribe a value to non-profit generating assets we need to look at ways in which we can quantify the value that the call center is contributing to overall business operations.

Call center data management and manipulation has lent itself particularly well to KPI metric and Balanced Scorecard methodology. KPI/Balanced Scorecard techniques are a mainstay of the management of any call center and using the metrics that are being produced from these management information tools allows to start calculating an approximation for ROI.

If we move away from the idea of profit centers that need to be maximized and cost centers that need to be cut so logically increasing profit, we can start thinking of the different business components as contributing value.

What is the value that we can ascribe to a call center it doesn’t create anything?

First, lets look at a revised ROI calculation, we can pretty easily work out a cost for the call center which is going to be used in the ROI calculation if we use that as asset value of the ROI number crunching.

Second, if we look at the relative contribution of call center activities we can start ascribing a value based on the effect on our financial and management accounting information. Linking information from customer service feedback and focus groups will allow us to develop an idea of the impact on repeat business for instance. Repeat business is something that our accounting and CRM system will be monitoring so we can get a value for that. The customer survey and feedback groups will also give an indication as to how important our customer service is in winning repeat business orders and that will in turn allow us to infer a value for that proportion of repeat business that is attributable to the call center efforts.

We are now close to being able to perform an ROI calculation in that we have determined a value that is created for the expense of our customer service efforts made by the call center.

Using such attributable value calculations for ROI is not flawless but it does provide a valuable tool for tracking the value of a non-revenue division that is being contributed to overall business success. Tracking ROI of this nature over time, as long as the calculation is made on a consistent basis will help indicate and highlight the relative success of initiatives and investment in the call center.

Calculating an overall ROI can be done by a broader attribution of value that is created by the call center and the total expense that is incurred by it. Used alone such an ROI calculation is not going to be of much help but the use of the incremental ROI that can be calculated for discrete costs and further investment in the call center is very useful for helping to justify whether incremental investment should be made or not.

The last time that you purchased something, did you happen to see on the bottom of the label an 800 number that you can call to find out information about the product or other products or services that the company offered? Or the last time that you traveled and had a question regarding the tickets that you had purchased, were you referred to and given a number to call? These places that companies now have you call with questions regarding their products or services are called “contact centers.”

Running a business such as an airline or drug company has its own problems, without having to constantly deal with customers or clients that have questions or problems. Also, when these customers and clients do have their issues it is imperative that they be solved as expediently as possible, so all parties involved are happy. Managing a contact center is a major undertaking, because if it isn’t done right a business will lose customers and money.

Contact Center Outsourcing Services Are Experts at Customer Relations

This is why more and more businesses are turning to contact center outsourcing as a solution to this issue. By using a contact center outsourcing service, business managers are then freed up to focus on actually running the business. Also, the business benefits by having a company handle this area of customer relations and service that specializes in it.

Cost Savings for the Business

A contact center outsourcing business is able to help the businesses that they serve to cut costs at the same time, which allows them to be more competitive. This is because, when a call is placed to a contact center outsourcing business it can all be handled over seas or by cheap labor subcontracted by a states prison industries in the U.S.