How to Reduce Costs in Your Contact Center
Rising costs and an economic downturn…It’s a recipe that’s forcing businesses to look at doing more with less.
With rising inflation and reducing non-essential spending, IT leaders are being tasked with creating cost-saving strategies across their operations while continuing to grow their contact center scope in the midst of uncertainty.
This is where an investment in cloud communications can help. Leveraging cloud technology can help reduce call center costs and drive business initiatives forward.
8 Tips for Cost-Savings in Call Centers
It’s not an easy time to be leading an organization’s IT voice infrastructure. As a recession slowly makes its impact across industries, right now it’s critical to determine where you can cut costs in your department, and specifically your contact center.
Consider these eight tips to help reduce call center costs by enacting cloud communications.
1. Move to the Cloud
This is your sign to move to the cloud: cost savings in your contact center. Doing so can significantly reduce– and in some cases, eliminate– hardware expenses like traditional phone lines, bulky servers, desk phones and more.
Instead of physical hardware, you have several virtual options when you move operations to the cloud, including:
- Web-based system to provide access to your on-prem PBX system through an internet connection.
- Virtual phone numbers offer users the ability to forward calls to another phone number, device or IP address.
- International porting to transfer an existing phone number to a different provider.
- SIP trunking establishes calls to your on-prem PBX through a data connection point.
Cloud voice lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by removing the equipment, maintenance personnel and service interruptions common in on-premise phone systems.
2. Intelligently Route Calls
Use the cloud to create dependable and intelligent call flows in and out of your ACD/IVR. With automation accompanying global call routing management, you can easily reduce contact center inefficiencies to drive better caller experiences on a single interface.
Intelligently set up round-robin and skills-based routing ring strategies to ensure callers are always routed to the best agent or staff member for their particular needs.
3. Manage Numbers and Documents
Having control over your account and processes is critical to maintaining order and efficiency.
With a cloud communications platform, you gain more autonomy and control over your network through self-service functionality. Reap the cost and time-saving benefits of purchasing and consolidating business phone numbers, viewing order status and uploading any in-country documentation required from within the platform, on your time.
4. Monitor Network Quality and Stability
Cloud communications were built to improve stability and reduce downtime. In fact, cloud-based call centers have reported having 27% less downtime than before incorporating their cloud-based solutions.
Ensure your call center backend is supported by a resilient global network that’s optimized for voice delivery. Partnering with a provider that offers proactive Quality of Service (QoS) analysis and number testing gives businesses more functionality and better network performance– saving you time and money!
5. Streamline Technology Synergy
With cloud communications, your IT team and agents can return relevant information quickly using APIs and webhooks. Here’s how:
- Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): Implementing request-driven APIs into your communications tools can help them expand and manage all of your business’s voice and phone numbers in one place, leading to a host of benefits including reduced call center costs.
- Webhooks: Incorporating event-driven webhooks into your communications tools can help agents pull customer data in real time from third-party applications like CRMs, sales automation and more.
Streamlining both your IT staff and customer-facing agents with interoperable technology increases agility throughout your business, ultimately reducing any communication friction.
6. Incorporate End-User Tools
Customizing the user experience for your customer-facing teams is more important today than ever before— and will only continue to grow in importance. Incorporating end-user tools may seem more costly, but it doesn’t have to be.
With the following features, your business’s sales and services teams can ensure their callers have a positive experience from the time they call in, to the time they end the call.
- Queue callback: Reduce call abandonment by allowing callers to save their spot in the queue with a virtual hold so the agents can call them back. This helps keep call queues manageable, your on-hold costs low and gives customers time back in their day.
- Skills-based routing: Route your customers to the right agent most equipped to handle the caller’s specific needs. Using tag-match criteria like language and VIP status, easily send callers to the agents who have those attributes and defining skills.
- Webphone: Agents can carry out calls directly from their internet browser. With a web-based application, you can divert the desk phone costs and put that money into other areas of the IT department.
7. Look for Scalable and Flexible
Spend your time leading and streamlining your business, not stressing over global presence expansion and juggling multiple vendor contracts. You need a solution that can adjust to your present and future needs in a scalable and flexible way– and within a one-stop-shop platform.
- Expand global coverage: As your company grows into new markets, easily scale your footprint with high-quality and reliable phone numbers across 150+ countries, instantly.
- Simplified billing: Reduce your stress and avoid payment errors with a flexible solution ideal for multinational companies. Consolidate subscription rates, usage rates and more into one invoice that covers all your vendors, carriers and currencies.
8. Don't Settle for Lack of Support
There are a lot of providers out there promoting their intuitive solutions– but how does their customer service stack up? When you need assistance, your cloud communications provider should always give enterprise-level support, including:
- Customer success: Top service providers will provide you with a regionally-focused support team that’s always available by phone, online chat or email to answer questions and give assistance.
- Onboarding: Personalized onboarding is key to ensuring you’re comfortable navigating the platform. Your cloud provider should help manage and assist in the implementation process.
- Support engineers: Your cloud communications provider should provide ongoing assistance including quarterly business, proactive monitoring of account activity, real-time alerts for suspicious activity, and weekly or monthly check-ins.
Because when an issue occurs, you need to resolve it quickly. A partnership with a provider who can offer transparency, responsiveness and a pathway to resolution is one worth considering.
Drive Down Your Contact Center Costs with a Reliable VoIP Provider
Organizations across the world are in a bind when it comes to their budget. Through a cloud communications platform, you have the power to reduce TCO costs and quantify investments made for your voice and contact center operations.
The AVOXI Platform offers you complete autonomy over your communications to help you reduce call center costs and boost growth. Expand your reach confidently and affordably with our scalable platform today.
eBook
Reducing Costs
in Your Global Voice Infrastructure
Modernizing your on-premise voice in the cloud reduces TCO, so you can scale and grow your market coverage. Get the eBook and lower voice spending.
