Do you want to save your hard-earned business profits?
Well, it’s not the story of your business. Everyone wants a solution to this question, no matter how big their enterprise is. And when you have a choice, what is the harm in taking it?
In businesses, there are multiple opportunities to grow your profits when it comes to savings. All you need is just the right strategies to make your business more cost-effective and profitable.
In this blog, we will explore 13 proven strategies by which you can reduce call center costs and save your business profits.
A call center is the most effective way to solve customer queries and inquiries related to your business’s product or service.
Imagine you’re facing a complicated technical problem with your computer. It’s not something you can easily explain in a few sentences and you’re feeling frustrated. In this situation, sending a text message or an email might not be the most effective way to convey the difficulty of the issue.
However, a phone call allows you to have a real-time conversation, ask questions, and provide detailed information. This personal and direct approach leads to faster and more accurate problem-solving, making the call center a preferred choice for customers.
That’s why companies set up or hire a call center that is dedicated to handling inbound and outbound customer calls.
Call center agents are equipped with the necessary tools and information to assist customers efficiently by addressing inquiries, resolving issues, and enhancing relationships.
Running a successful call center that contributes to your business’s growth can be a challenging task, as it requires various components, including office rent, CRM software, technology investment, and hiring call center agents. All of these elements require capital.
This is where most businesses do not succeed in managing their call centers, either due to lack of capital or due to lack of knowledge about call center cost reduction.
Are you experiencing difficulties managing and optimizing the expenses associated with your call center operations?
You can overcome these difficulties and challenges with the strategies of reducing call center costs.
Top 13 strategies to slash out call center cost
When it comes to saving, everyone loves to get this opportunity. Do you remember how we all waited for the sale to buy stuff? We all have saved money at times, whether it’s by buying something from a sale or buying something in bulk. We always tried to find different ways to improve our savings.
But, when it comes to reducing call center costs, we do not have much way. So here I’m providing various strategies that you can adopt to achieve cost reduction without compromising customer service quality.
Maximize workforce management
Employees are the most important, expensive, and integral element of any call center. It is the call center agents who make your customers happy and satisfied. In businesses, it sometimes happens that you are facing fluctuation in call volumes and feel that you have more staff or less staff. To overcome this problem and fine-tune your staffing, you need workforce management.
Workforce management can help you avoid overstaffing or understaffing. It ensures that you have the right number of agents available who can quickly respond to customer complaints and handle inquiries during peak hours, preventing unnecessary employee costs.
Take, for example, a call center for an ecommerce company, workforce management is essential. During the holiday and festive seasons, it ensures the right number of agents are available to handle customer inquiries.
Without workforce management, it might be possible you hire a larger workforce, resulting in excessive employee costs, or hire less staff which can increase the frustration of your customers and decrease your sales.
By analyzing historical data and hiring extra agents during peak hours, the call center can efficiently manage its workforce, reduce costs, and provide better customer service.
Adjust staff as per your business requirements.
Let AM2PM Support can provide you with this flexibility.
Conduct training and development programs for agents
Training is the foundation upon which we build our dreams. It empowers individuals to reach beyond their limits and achieve greatness. In the world of business, it transforms employees into assets, driving organizational success.
Zig Ziglar
Don’t underestimate the power of well-trained agents. Regular training and development programs for agents can lead to long-term savings for your business.
It ensures that your agents are well-trained and knowledgeable to handle customer interactions more efficiently, leading to higher first-call resolution rates and reduced average handling times (AHT). These training programs not only boost customer satisfaction but also saves time and minimizes call center cost.
For example, you can add training sessions such as role-playing, quizzes, icebreakers, or group discussions to help your employees learn while having fun. Also, this enjoyable learning helps your agents to remember and understand things better.
Use data-driven insights
Make data your assistance in cost reduction. Dive into the numbers to gain insights into your call center’s performance. It can help in identifying inefficient areas in your call center operations that need improvements.
With continuous measurement and focus on call center metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), you can refine trends and patterns that could be contributing to higher costs. This data-driven information will enable you to make informed decisions on optimizing processes and reducing expenses, resulting in significant cost savings.
Let me tell you about how Uber used data to improve its services. Uber started as a ride-hailing company, but they realized that they could learn a lot from the data they were collecting. By looking at information about how people use their app, where they need rides, and how drivers perform.
Uber found that they could make their pricing by optimizing drivers’ routes, retaining existing customers, and providing a consistent number of drivers in high-demand areas.
This helped them grow and even start a food delivery service called UberEats. They keep using data to change and make things better, so riders and drivers have a good experience. In simple terms, Uber’s success comes from using data to make its services more convenient and adaptable to what people need.
Adopt automation and AI advancements
Adopting automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in your call center can be a game-changer. Implementing AI-powered tools like customer service chatbots, and virtual assistants can help you automate processes to streamline routine tasks more efficiently, and allow your agents to focus on more complex issues. Automating repetitive processes can reduce the need for human intervention, so you can significantly cut operational costs.
According to IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, in today’s world 35% of companies reported using AI in their business, and an additional 42% reported they are exploring AI.
They also found AI adoption is growing steadily with 13% YoY growth compared with 2021, organizations are more likely to have adopted AI in 2022.
So, using automation and AI tools in your call center can make a big difference. They help automate routine tasks, so your agents can focus on harder issues, and this can save you money.
Redirect the focus of your team to core business activities.
Outsource AM2PM Support ecommerce customer service.
Optimize your call routing approach
Call routing refers to the process of transferring customers’ calls to the right agent or department. Call routing ensures that every customer gets their questions answered faster and more efficiently. It amplifies your customer satisfaction and makes them happy and loyal to your business.
Take, for example, you’re in the middle of an important meeting with the clients and suddenly your internet stops working. You immediately grabbed your phone and started calling the customer support number. Things got worse here when the executive replied, ‘I understand your concern, but this issue is handled by a different department. Please hold while I connect you to the right team.’
It can be really annoying to keep connecting with different agents who cannot do anything for you, that is where the call routing approach comes into the picture.
By routing inbound calls, you can connect customers to the most qualified agents who are proficient in solving customers’ problems in less time. It helps reduce call handle times, increase first-call resolution (FCR) rates, and improve customer satisfaction, all while lowering costs.
Implement call deflection strategies
Do your customers really need to call your business, every time?
By implementing call deflection strategies such as IVR (Interactive Voice Response), self-help resources, and chatbots, you can enable your customers to find answers independently. This decreases the volume of calls and ultimately, your operational costs.
Let’s understand how Airtel, the telecom company, is making things hassle-free for its customers. When you call them, they’ve set up a menu system (IVR) that helps you choose what you need – like pressing 1 for billing, 2 for tech help, and so on.
Also, on their website and app, they’ve tons of helpful articles, FAQs, and videos that can assist you in various ways, from setting up your devices to understanding your bill.
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Along with this, they’ve chatbots that answer your questions really fast. All of this aims to reduce your waiting time and make your experience smoother. It’s not only convenient for you but also helps Airtel save on costs.
Switch to cost-effective cloud-based solutions
Cloud-based solutions refer to the contact center that operates using cloud computing technology and services. It offers you pay for the services and resources you use, typically on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis.
Cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions provide the same capabilities as on-premises services but without expensive upfront hardware costs. This is because instead of relying on traditional on-premises hardware, cloud-based call centers utilize internet-based infrastructure and software solutions.
You do not have to pay for office rent and on-premises hardware. Additionally, you only pay for what you need, making it a cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premises systems. Furthermore, you can work remotely as well, and that is a highly flexible solution.
Monitor and reduce average handle time
One of the best ways to reduce call center costs is by lowering the average handle time (AHT). The shorter the handling time, the more efficient your call center becomes.
By keeping a close eye on the average time your agents spend on each call, you can identify opportunities to streamline processes and improve agent efficiency.
Providing agents with effective tools, resources, training, ready-made call scripts, and canned responses can help them resolve customer issues more quickly and effectively without compromising service quality.
This reduces average handle time and lowers overall costs.
At AM2PM Support, we understand the importance of cost savings in call center operations. Our strategy focuses on lowering average handle times (AHT) to boost efficiency. We achieve this by closely monitoring call durations, identifying process improvements, and providing our agents with the right tools, training, and scripts.
This proactive approach not only reduces AHT but also slashes overall costs for your business.
Conduct regular cost-benefit analysis
Performing a cost-benefit analysis of call center operations helps you identify areas where you can trim expenses. These analyses provide the insights you need to make informed decisions about which task to prioritize and where to allocate resources for maximum cost savings.
Here are a few important points to consider during cost-benefit analysis.
- Initial setup costs.
- Operational costs.
- Staffing expenses.
- Training and development costs.
- Technology and infrastructure costs.
- Revenue generation and customer retention.
This analysis helps your business to optimize call center operations while minimizing costs. With the right tools and evaluation of return on investment (ROI) on technologies and strategies, you can attain significant savings without losing service quality.
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Minimize the number of technology vendors
As a business owner, it is very obvious to think of having a list of multiple vendors for every task. But this philosophy cannot work everywhere.
If you work with multiple technology vendors for your call center you might be paying more than you need to. You might have different contract lengths for each vendor, or their prices might fluctuate.
By limiting the number of vendors, you can work more closely with a few good vendors like AM2PM Support who can cover all of your needs. This not only reduces the amount of toggling between vendors but also reduces the amount of time you spend on training your employees.
Omnichannel platform
Omnichannel platforms can help you cut call center costs in several ways. Begin with, it lets your agents handle customer inquiries and issues through different channels like email, chat, social media, and calls. This helps your agent work more efficiently.
In addition, omnichannel support automates some of the routine stuff like answering common questions with chatbots. This helps your agents focus on the more complicated tasks and lowers your operational costs.
Moreover, when customers get consistent and smooth experiences across these channels, they are less likely to call back with complaints or problems. This keeps your customer happy and reduces the costs of dealing with repeat issues.
By adopting omnichannel solutions from a reliable company like AM2PM Support, you can reduce stress and operational overhead while creating more opportunities to sell your products and services.
For example, Starbucks offers a seamless customer experience through various channels, including their mobile app, website, and social media interactions. Customers can order and pay for their coffee using the mobile app, check their reward points, and even interact with Starbucks through social media for inquiries.
The ability to transition between these channels while maintaining a consistent and convenient experience helps Starbucks deepen customer relationships and drive repeat purchases.
Reduce inbound contact volumes
Reducing inbound contact volumes can significantly lower your call center cost. This is achieved by implementing strategies like IVR, chatbots, and live chat outsourcing that make it easier for customers to find information or resolve issues without dialing, resulting in fewer incoming calls.
For example, companies like Amazon, and Flipkart offer live chat support to reduce their inbound contact volumes.
 Flipkart support |  Amazon support |
By optimizing processes and enhancing self-service options you can reduce the number of call center staff and infrastructure, leading to substantial cost savings. This not only streamlines your business operations but also ensures a better customer experience with cost-efficient customer support.
Struggling with volumes of inbound calls?
Let AM2PM Support help you with the same.
Improve first-call resolution (FCR) rates
Imagine a customer calling for the same issue over and over again. It might be possible that your agent is unable to solve the customer’s problems on the first call due to any of the reasons such as a lack of tools, or training. This repeated call will definitely increase your cost per call.
To prevent such a situation, provide your agents with the right tools, resources, and training to enable them to resolve customer concerns in the first call. This improvement boosts your FCR (First-Call Resolution) rate, which, in turn, saves you money and enhances the customer service experience by reducing the number of repeated calls and the need for follow-up calls.
Bonus Tip- Outsource it all!
With all the above strategies you can reduce call center costs and improve your savings, but working on these strategies is tedious and at the same time it puts an extra burden on your shoulders.
If running a call center is not a part of your core business operations, outsourcing can be your best friend. Companies like AM2PM Support have implemented all these strategies to help you save money and keep your customers happy and satisfied with outstanding service.
Ready to lower your call center cost without losing service quality?
Companies rely on call centers to handle customer interactions, such as technical support, sales, answering inquiries, and addressing customer issues. However, setting up a call center that works well can be quite challenging. It requires a significant amount of money, a focused team, effective strategies, and other factors to succeed.
To help businesses reduce call center operations, companies such as AM2PM Support offer a range of strategic solutions to meet your specific needs. These solutions help you optimize call center operations and achieve substantial cost savings.
With a commitment to enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction, AM2PM Support helps streamline your business operations while offering cost-efficient customer support.
Get a personalized free callback today!
