Control Contact Center Costs

What It Is

Across the government, contact centers are stretched to the limit by increasing demands for more services. One big challenge is how to do more with less, while at the same time improving performance and customer satisfaction. To meet this challenge, contact center operators must drive down costs and invest the savings in new technology and services.

How To Implement

Before making any major changes, it's essential to assess your customer contact strategies in the following areas:

• Suite of services and access channels (phone, email, web chat, etc.)
• Hours of operation
• Service level and response time objectives.

Without this strategic reassessment, cost control efforts may end up at odds with your organization's customer service goals. For example, reducing hours of operation on the phone may cause customers to seek answers via a more expensive service such as email. Phone operation costs may go down, but you'll likely see an increase in support costs via other channels.

Also assess overall cross–cutting measures to find overall cost and operational efficiencies throughout your agency, instead of focusing only on specific improvements to the contact center.

After this assessment, you can identify potential cost reduction areas, select and prioritize target activities, and implement actions to achieve the reductions.

The major contact center cost drivers are:

Contact Volume

This is the volume of inbound and outbound contacts for all services (phone, email, web, chat, fax, etc.). As volume increases, operating costs will likely rise. When volumes increase, find out why and implement business process improvements, such as a campaign to drive traffic to a less–expensive channel. Develop a strategy to reroute misdirected contacts. If a large number of misdirected calls have a common topic, try an Integrated Voice Response (IVR) message redirecting callers before they ever reach an agent.

Handle Time

How much time does it take to answer an inquiry (e.g., talk time plus after call wrap up time for telephone calls)? Longer handle time require more staff. Since labor cost is the single biggest expense in a contact center operation, reducing the handle time by just a few seconds per transaction can translate into significant cost and performance benefits. Reduce handle time by improving: business processes; system enhancements/response time; training; and quality monitoring that translates to corrective action.

Human Resource Costs

Control labor costs for handling inquiries with effective workforce management. Having the right people at the optimum staffing level during operating hours means the contact center is operating at maximum efficiency. Under–staffing will reduce payroll costs, but result in poor service. Over–staffing will increase the payroll, but may not increase performance.

Workforce management products can help forecast workload and staffing requirements, schedule agent assignments, and track their adherence to the assigned schedules. Combine agent pools and cross–train them to handle different types of inquiries to maximize efficiency. The right staffing model can result in significant payroll savings over time.

Telecommunications Costs

These are costs of telecommunications services incurred to enable customers to access your contact center (toll–free telephone service, trunk circuits, IVR usage etc.). These costs are directly linked to contact volume and staffing level. An imbalance in contact volume and staffing level will likely lead to longer wait time and high telecommunications costs, not to mention poor service level and low customer satisfaction. Also, insufficient staffing may lead to multiple callbacks, adding to the telecommunications costs.

Pay attention to the per–call charge levied by the toll–free telephone service provider for calls made from pay phones. You bear the cost of the toll–free number, and there is evidence that fraudulent pay phone activities can add thousands of dollars to your telephone bills. Examine the call detail records carefully for potential abuse and be prepared to take action to block pay phone calls, if necessary.

Resources

• Lean and Mean - Cost Reduction Strategies for these Uncertain Economic Times (PDF, 43 KB, 6 pages, October 2009)
• Identifying and Preventing Fraudulent Pay-Phone Calls

Content Lead: Tonya Beres
Page Reviewed/Updated: April 23, 2012