Are You Overpaying for Your Contact Center Voice?
Your contact center’s voice communications Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) can be broken down into two types of costs – visible and invisible.
Visible costs driving TCO are easy to calculate as they include everything that falls within voice technology acquisition, including servers, phones, phone lines, and computers. As the name suggests, invisible costs are harder to track. These costs make up the majority of your TCO and include factors like licenses, in-country labor and maintenance, and downtime.
With a lack of visibility into those costs, you may be overpaying for your current contact center solution. Below, we’re discussing the factors and challenges that may affect your contact center's price. And more importantly, how you can modernize your contact center’s voice system to reduce costs and scale efficiency.
What Factors Affect Contact Center Voice Pricing?
Everyone has different requirements for their contact center’s communications. As such, contact center voice providers offer a variety of solution packages and pricing to best suit those needs. The resources and tools available factor into the price, which we’ll break down for you below.
1. Voice Infrastructure
Your cloud voice infrastructure is a large part of your contact center cost. Phone lines, telephones, servers, and computers cost businesses millions of dollars to install and maintain.
A contact center voice platform is an easy solution to reduce telephony spending and gain access to robust call tools you and your agent teams need to succeed.
These include features and capabilities such as…
- Platform Intelligence: Contrary to what you might think, an intelligent platform doesn’t mean higher costs. Cloud contact center voice solutions reduce costs by consolidating telephony carriers and call tools into one interface, automating tasks, and streamlining workflows to create more efficiency across your tech stack.
- Voice management and routing capabilities: Managing voice and routing is a tough task when using outdated contact center equipment. Optimizing your voice resources can help you create the operational and cost efficiencies required of you. With a cloud-based solution, you’ll be able to lower costs by eliminating the reliance on old infrastructure and gain flexibility with visual drag-and-drop routing capabilities and with no architectural changes.
- Configurations and setup: The more complex the setup and configurations required, the more time and resources you’ll spend on implementation. This is just another reason why traditional call center infrastructure comes with higher costs. Cloud contact center solutions take minutes to set up and configure with no downtime. And platform maintenance is the responsibility of the provider– requiring little oversight on your end!
2. Number of User Seats
The number of licenses required directly affects the pricing of contact center software. Typically, these are prices on a per-user basis.
Integrating a cloud contact center voice solution with your legacy on-premise call center or CCaaS system can scale as you need without driving the cost up. Additionally, you’ll be able to incorporate your own devices and reduce spend on desktop equipment.
3. Company Size
Contact center voice providers offer minute and feature-set plans relative to the needs of all types of organizations– including various call volume and feature packages. But more likely than not, the larger the company, the more calls they’re making and receiving which may require more tools and thus more cost.
Hosted contact center voice solutions generally come in a tiered structure– operating on cost increases as additional features and services are added. This way, you have flexibility in choosing the features and services that best fit your needs and budget.
4. Features
Contact center features play a large role in the cost of your call center. On-premise voice stacks are limited in what they can offer. Basic capabilities are a given, but any advanced features are going to cost extra.
With contact center voice software, you can ramp up your legacy stack to support international calls anywhere in the world. Standard and advanced features are bundled into your plan and may include...
- Standard features like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), call recording, and call queuing.
- Advanced features like personalized IVR, skills-based routing, real-time analytics, and integrations to improve the customer experience.
These advanced functionalities also help improve your contact center's efficiency through automation and no-code solutions.
5. Call Rates
Companies solely using on-premise phone systems overpay for their contact center’s call rates. Expanding into new markets is costly without a cloud-based solution.
Paying high vs. low call rates depends on the carriers and usage. Cloud contact center voice providers with better carrier relationships offer more favorable rates for their global voice services. VoIP services can save you up to 90% on international calls.
We go into even deeper detail on how coverage can impact your call center’s overall TCO in our latest ebook. Get your copy now →
6. Support
Having a contact center voice solution with proactive and responsive support can significantly lower costs, minimize downtime, and prevent revenue loss for your team through fast and efficient resolutions. Is your legacy contact center solution capable of going above and beyond?
Three common types of cloud contact center solution support types include:
- Standard support is limited to channel availability, such as phone and email, and typically responds within 24 to 48 hours.
- Real-time support provides instantaneous responses and faster resolutions. There are generally more channels available for you to receive assistance, including phone, chat, email, and social media.
- Premium support offers a dedicated point of contact for technical support, multi-channel support (phone, chat, email, social media, collaboration apps such as Microsoft Teams or Slack), and priority resolution.
While some types of support may be an add-on cost, the long-term play here is making sure your customers always have the best experience calling your contact center. Poor call quality, inefficient routing, or phone numbers that aren’t in service can impact that experience before they ever reach an agent.
This is where having that proactive and responsive support can be an added value to your business.
7. Analytics and Reporting
To effectively monitor and optimize the voice performance of the contact center, you may require detailed analytics and reporting tools that provide insights into your Quality of Service (QoS), call traffic patterns, call audio quality, and other call center key metrics.
Though many platforms offer basic reporting as a built-in feature, the cost of more advanced reporting tools depends on the provider, level of detail, customization, and level of integration required.
Why Are Tech Leaders Facing Financial Challenges in Their Call Centers?
If you’re feeling the impact of budget constraints, you’re not alone. Tech leaders across industries are facing financial challenges in their contact centers due to many reasons:
- A lower or reduced budget is the product of economic uncertainty. To keep goals on track while being sensitive to budget constraints, leaders are looking to minimize IT by consolidating solutions and seeking more economically attractive voice offerings.
- Employee attrition, which can lead to a loss of institutional knowledge and put additional pressure on the remaining staff to fill the gap, resulting in employee burnout, increased training costs, and reduced capacity.
- Consolidating similar tools that aren’t integration-compatible. In these cases, additional apps and tools may be needed to fill the gaps, resulting in higher costs and a more complex technology stack.
- Paying for unnecessary features may result in forcing the organization to pay for a higher-tiered package to get the features they need.
- Frequent outages can result in lost productivity, dissatisfied customers, and increased costs associated with resolving the issue.
Regardless of which of these struggles you may be facing, each can make it difficult for you to maintain a stable and effective call center environment and can sabotage your team’s productivity.
Get to Know a Better Contact Center Voice Solution
It’s 100% possible to manage your TCO and access an affordable contact center voice solution with a robust suite of advanced call features.
That’s the AVOXI Platform. Our cloud contact center voice solution is a one-stop shop for all your communications needs. You’ll have everything you need to manage your voice services, expand global connections, and enrich the customer experience from a centralized and intuitive interface.
It’s time to give your legacy phone system the boost it needs. Learn how to modernize your global communications so you can save time, reduce costs, and scale as your business grows.
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