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The primary aim of a call center is to enhance customer loyalty. While a well-managed call center can strategically act as a catalyst to achieve this goal, a poorly managed one can prove to be the opposite and turn into a major liability for the business. That is why it is not enough to just create a call center. In order to achieve competitive advantage for your business, your call center must act as a source of value creation. This requires you to establish equilibrium between maintaining operational efficiency and providing quality service through well-trained agents. Continue reading “A to Z of Creating a Profitable Call Center”

I absolutely understand your problem Mr. X/ Ms. Y and I can certainly help you.
What I will do for you right away is raise a ticket, provide you with the reference number and try my best to get your problem resolved by the evening.
Rest assured Mr. X/Ms. Y, we are there for you and everything is now under control.

How amazing do you feel when you hear such beautiful combination of words from a call center agent? Without bashing or shouting on any call center agent you are able to get your problem resolved or at least able to get it processed for getting it fixed. Continue reading “Clutched with Spikes in Call Volume: Manage it Now”

Contact centers act as an effective route to add value to the business. But running a call center involves various overheads. The most obvious ones include the employee wages, expenses involved in making calls to customers, and the other setup costs.

Cost per call is a call center metric that enables contact centers to measure the overall efficiency. Business managers or call center owners struggle with ways to reduce costs without compromising on customer service quality. In order to achieve the optimum balance, the first step is to determine the cost per call.

Key Contact Center Costing Parameters

Outlined below are a few factors that add to your cost per call apart from the employee wages. All of these parameters determine the cost per call and budget in the expenses of your call center.

1. One time setup costs like office space infrastructure, calling hardware, servers, PRI, and telephony deposits.
2. Depending on the purchase model, license subscriptions (annual/monthly) for agents and supervisors for call center management software need recurring investments from the business owner.
3. Business support or annual maintenance costs depending on the type of support package purchased from the contact center vendor.
4. Hiring resources and training the resources to get on board and handle the calls asks for monetary investments as well as the investment of time from the management.
5. The other primary factor involved in call costs calculation is the call charges involved, with values varying for local outbound calls and STD outbound calls.

Calculating Cost Per Call

1. The first step of calculating the cost per call in a call center is to compile a list of all the call center agents working for your center.
2. Define the time period for which you want to calculate the cost per call (hour/day/week/month/quarter/year).
3. Decide the number of calls attended by each agent during an average shift.
4. Make a list of the agents, the average number of calls made by each agent during a week, and the wages of each agent.
5. Determine the average number of calls attended by agents during a period of one hour.
6. To determine the cost per call, take the agent’s wage and divide it by the average number of calls made by the agent during an hour.
7. To determine the total cost per call for one agent, take the average wage paid to your agents per hour, and divide the number by the average calls handled by your call center in an hour.

How to reduce your Cost Per Call?

In order to improve the efficiency of your call center and reduce costs, you will have to implement measures to reduce the cost per call. Here are a few tips to help you reduce the cost per call for your call center.

1. Ensure Quality Training: Hiring and training employees cost a huge amount of money for any call center. Ensure that your employees receive quality training and can handle calls in minimal average handling time. Well-trained employees can help to reduce call times and improve the first-call resolution rate. This, in turn, can improve customer service quality and reduce cost per call.
2. Keep a close check with Call Monitoring: One effective way of keeping costs down is to maintain high call quality. The best way to achieve this goal is to implement real-time call monitoring. Call center managers must monitor calls and offer constructive feedback to agents to improve their quality. This will again ensure improved FCR and low AHT and decrease the cost per call.
3. Adopt Effective Scheduling: Proper agent scheduling can go a long way in reducing cost per call. Considering factors like peak call times, and agents’ adherence level while scheduling agent shifts can help to improve customer service and utilize agents to their maximum potentials thus bringing down the cost per call.

Conclusion

Cost per call is not the only factor that can transform a call center into a profitable one. But it sure is one of the ways that can help to maximize employee efficiency and reduce costs. Today, we have tried to answer a few of the apt questions that one might have while evaluating contact center costs. Ameyo’s Call Center Software has all the features that can help you get started with your calling process in just 48 hours.

Looking for setting up a cost-effective contact center software? Schedule a demo today and hear from our team of experts!