Pricing versus ROI – flexibility matters when choosing a contact center. Mistakes quickly add up – easily exceeding any initial saving. Make the wrong choice and you’re stuck with it, causing a permanent drain on your business.

Ease of delivery and acquisition can mask problems that lead to a serious OPEX impact

It all sounds so easy – in just a few clicks on some website, you can buy a service, setup an account and you’ll have 10 or 20 agents set up – ready for the phones to start ringing. A pretty website, great marketing, attractive UI (hopefully not faked). What more do you need?

But just stop and think for a moment. What problems have you actually solved? And are you getting any ROI?

The biggest cost in most contact centers is personnel, and real ROI is produced when savings or increased effectiveness are delivered in this domain. As you probably know, routing calls to the wrong agents is one of the largest burners of money in the contact center. A simple click to dial and screen popup solution for your CRM will not solve this task. Calls will still be routed to the wrong agents unless the information stored your business process systems is used to make intelligent routing decisions.

Let’s illustrate this with a typical scenario we have solved for one of our customers:

• B2B Customers need to be routed to a specific department depending on their status
  • To a particular specialized group of agents depending on the products they sell
  • To the B2B support group if they are calling regarding an open trouble ticket
• B2C Customers and unknown callers get routed to the general service group where their needs are further qualified.

For the B2B customers, a dynamic IVR menu was built. Only if an open trouble ticket was found in the ticketing system was the IVR menu presented to the caller. A simple question of “Press 1 if you are calling regarding an open trouble ticket, otherwise just hold and we will transfer you to our sales consultants” was enough to make sure B2B calls were routed correctly in almost 100% of cases.

That’s generates real savings. Let’s take a look how much this can be:

• 20 Agents working a net of 6 hours per day (breaks taken into account)
• Agents answer about 15 calls per hour
• 30% of calls were routed incorrectly
• Resolving an incorrectly routed call takes about 1 minute

Incorrect routing occurred on 30% of calls (that’s 27 live calls) each day - costing 27 minutes of agent time per day to solve. Or 9.45 hours per month based on 21 working days. Or to put it more plainly: 7.5% of your personnel costs.

Let’s say you have 20 agents, and each agent costs an average of €3500 per month (all costs in). Routing incorrectly translates to 5250 EUR of money burned every month. And that’s not even factoring in employee holidays, sick time and more. This figure will be higher in most businesses.

Real contact center software helps you solve these problems. So don’t jump for a cheap and glossy solution, without taking a look at how a professional contact center solution can really help you.