Now profitability is not only determined by the revenue that the call centre generates for the organisation but also the overall value that it provides to the organisation. So, at any point of time as a business owner if you are strategizing on improving the ROI of your call centre, then here are four great ways that will help boost the profitability of your call centre, read on to find out.
1 Driving the Cost Efficiency in Call Center
The ultimate intention of establishing the contact centres is to drive the cost efficiencies in the organisation. This can be done by handling customer communications effectively while making an optimal use of the resources available.
For a business it makes more sense to focus on quantity of call attended and made out during a day than the quality of each call. That is also a reason why we hear most BPO focussing or paying the support agents on the basis of number of calls handled. This in turn forces agents to quickly complete a call and move on to the next. However, a prolonged practice of putting quantity over quality results in deteriorating customer satisfaction, customer frustration, dissatisfaction of the agents, repeat contacts along with increased attrition.
A good balance will be to focus on activities that can provide quicker call resolution and one of the most important aspect to it is call routing. A call centre can benefit greatly from accurate call routing so an agent equipped to handle a conversation only gets to handle the call. Apart from the call routing some of the fundamental metrics such as level of service offered, adherence to call schedules and the accuracy of required resource forecast make sure that the contact centres are able to appropriately control as well as monitor their cost efficiency thereby laying the stepping stone towards the improvement of the profitability of the contact centres.
According to Strategyr, the global market for call centers is estimated at $339 billion in 2021
2 Maximisation of the ROI of the Satisfaction of Customers and Loyalty
The success of any organization, as well as its long-term growth, certainly depends on the satisfaction of the customers and their loyalty towards the business. In this regard, the call centre function of a business has the greatest impact on the rate of retention and advocacy of the customers apart from being the most dominant factor driving the satisfaction level of customers.
It will be therefore a good practice for your call centre team to take feedback on the calls completed, and track that feedback to continuously work on it and improve. Software that will greatly benefit the profitability of your call centre is Omnichannel. Having an Omnichannel solution will mean that you integrate all the channels of communication your business use on a single platform. The tracking of all interactions on a single platform helps agents with an understanding of context and can enable to offer accurate solutions to a customer’s problem. With Omnichannel, a business can really maximise their return on investment, while ensuring that their customers get a unified experience across all channels in a frictionless manner. The personalisation that comes as a result of using the Omnichannel tool also helps build customer loyalty and longer customer retention which in turn will play a vital role in increasing the profitability of the call centre.
3 Leveraging of the Call center like a Strategic Asset
A call centre captures tonnes of data about customers, every single day. It commonly acts as an organisation’s information hub; they not only have valuable customers’ insights, but a call centre also collects some robust product or service related data along with marketing relevant information, which can be shared throughout the departments of the organisation for the purpose of driving innovations, improvements as well as long term growth.
Today we are living in a customer-centric business world and hence it is almost a mandate to pay a lot of attention to that potential information. But the complexities in the systems of a call centre and the siloed approach make it difficult for a call centre to streamline their information flow and analyse them holistically to make an appropriate use of the highly personalised information they collect. The call centre has the ability to break the stigma of being the cost centre of a business by using an integrated CRM and analytics software so they can accurately capture customer information along with the feedback on products or services. This is undoubtedly not an easy task keeping in mind the mounds of data that a call centre collects every day, but not impossible as well. When this potential information is harnessed in a proper manner, they have enormous ability to offer a great value to the organisation.
4 Increasing the Opportunities for Revenue in Call Center
Opportunities for increasing the revenue of the organisation through the call centre will necessarily make sure that the profitability is enhanced at the same time. In this situation, the opportunities for generation of revenue can only be maximised by the enhancement of ability of the agents of the call centres for converting the cross selling and up selling opportunities. This not only increase the revenues for the organisation but also help in the building up of customer relationships and enhance the awareness of the customers. It is therefore important for a call centre head to take a serious look at the training needs of the agents, to consider proper identification of skills that can lead to not just improve customer satisfaction but also increase the opportunities of up-sell or cross-sell.
So, here are the top four points that can help you as a business manager to improve the profitability of your call centres. These are also some low hanging fruits that can be easily benefited from by evolving the soft skills like empathy, active listening and decision making which are beyond tools but key for customer satisfaction, Life time customer value and eventually profitability.
