Running a contact center comes with many overhead costs, leading you to charge more from your customers than needed to sustain your business. Thankfully, there are many different ways you can reduce contact center costs and optimize your spending.
Let’s first identify where you can save costs and then go over the different ways to cut down.
How to Save Money on Your Contact Center?
From needing office space to using various software, contact center costs can quickly rise up. This is especially true if you run an in-house or on-premise contact center and offer customers an array of solutions. You will need advanced technology and software to offer those solutions, and those costs can slowly creep up. So, what is your contact center spending on the most?
Contact Center Costs
Before you identify ways to cut down on costs, you need to review where your contact center is spending its money. This may be different for different types of contact centers (on-premise, in-house, or cloud contact centers) but generally speaking, here is where most contact center costs lie:
- Office space,
- Office equipment and hardware — desks, chairs, computers, desk phones, headsets, and so on,
- Contact center software,
- CRM and customer service solutions,
- Salaries, benefits, and hiring costs.
Now, you pin down areas where you can reduce contact center costs. For instance, you need to hire quality customer services and sales representatives, so that may not be the best place to get stingy. However, you can cut down the amount of office equipment and software needed by finding providers that offer packages and combined services.
For example, you might find a phone service provider that lets you make and receive business calls from a computer, removing the need for a desk phone. Similarly, if you hire remote agents, then you can cut down on the need for more office space and computers by having these employees use remote phone systems.
Reduce Contact Center Costs in 5 Ways
So, what can you do to save money on your contact center? The solutions listed below are suggestions for new processes and technologies. Not all of these solutions will work for your exact business needs. Evaluate your current options and make a decision accordingly.
Here are 5 ways to reduce contact center costs without compromising on the quality of service:
1. Take Your Contact Center to the Cloud with VoIP
If you run an in-house or premise contact center, the first step to reducing costs is moving to the cloud. Switching to a cloud VoIP communication system can drastically bring down the amount your center spends on core telephony services.
Cloud VoIP services have monthly subscriptions that can easily be scaled or canceled as needed. Additionally, these subscriptions come packed with features, services, and integrations that let you expand your offerings without needing to purchase additional services.
One such example is the softphone offered by United World Telecom. This softphone can be downloaded on computers and smartphones as an app or web browsers as an extension. By doing so, users can make and receive calls through the business phone number from any device. This cuts down the need to purchase high-quality and feature-filled desk phones.
2. Consider BYOC & SIP Trunking Services
Bring your own carrier (BYOC) enables organizations to add their own carrier or SIP trunking provider to their communication or CCaaS system. SIP trunking is a bundled telephony solution that gives you access to multiple cloud phone lines in one trunk.
BYOC and SIP trunking, together, make a quality cloud-based contact center solution that brings more flexibility, scalability, and control over your communication system. By mixing your suppliers and choosing ones that you want, you can:
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- Add new markets by choosing providers that have access to global regions and countries.
- Customize and control call routing and forwarding.
- Avoid regulatory and quality issues.
- Reduce costs spent on high-priced carriers that offer little-to-no flexibility and control.
Related: The Complete Guide to Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
3. Hire Remote Agents
Next, you want to consider hiring remote and distributed teams. Remote employees can stay connected and do their jobs effectively through your cloud communication solution and cloud-based CRM. By doing so, you can save on office space and equipment costs.
With advanced call center software, you can monitor agents on call and even join these calls silently. This way, remote agents don’t work in isolation, and you can track their progress through reports and metrics.
Additionally, with remote agents and international call routing, you can offer 24/7 support for customers who call outside the 9-5 workday. This way, you don’t pay your regular employees overtime or have employees work in shifts. You just forward incoming calls to the few remote agents working outside of office hours. This way, your contact center continues to offer services even when most businesses are closed.
4. Consolidate Services into One Platform
Another benefit of using a cloud communication service is bringing all your services to one platform. With Unified Communications (UCaaS), you can access your contact center’s communications, data, reports, and management systems, all in one place. By consolidating services into one platform, your contact center can have:
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- Improved collaboration and business continuity.
- Low communication- and IT-related costs.
- Easy management of remote teams.
- Improved customer and caller experience.
Want to learn more about unified communications? Check out our UCaaS guide for business.
5. Utilize Automation and APIs
Communication and customer service automation can help you reduce contact center costs quite dramatically. Using APIs and automation features, you can save time and money on manually completing tasks and moving processes along.
One example is to use an automated voice response system (IVR) to answer common questions asked by callers. This reduces the number of calls coming to agents and gives them space to work on more complex calls. Similarly, you can even have the auto-attendant route calls to the right department based on caller input, saving costs on hiring an operator or receptionist.
Reduce Contact Center Costs Try United World Telecom’s Cloud Phone Service
With United World Telecom’s phone service solution, contact centers have access to a full suite of business phone services for reasonable prices. We offer five different plans so that you can choose one that works best for your contact center. Additionally, you do not need to get into long-term contracts with us. Use your service on a month-to-month basis and cancel whenever you need to. Give us a try! Speak with a representative to learn more about what we offer and how we can help your contact center save money!