Guide to Measuring ROI – 10 Tips & Tricks
Contact centre managers never stop being reminded of their top priorities: maximizing efficiency, reducing expenses, and maintaining consistently high client service levels.
Improved contact centre technology has put efficiency at stunningly high levels, but it’s sometimes hard to manage costs. While you know there are many ways to assess your client service centre’s performance – many that aren’t expressed as KPIs or metrics – the executive suite only wants to hear about cold, hard numbers.
Multichannel Merchant’s 2013 Outlook report found that nearly 17 percent of contact centres measured their ROI in 2013, with fully 25.8 percent planning to track contact centre ROI in 2014. If you need to throw the books at top-level management and make a clean case for the return on investment (ROI) of your call centre, consider these 10 talking points to help you get the corner offices in your corner. Since your team is judged based on service metrics while the rest of the organization is thinking about sales, you may have to put things differently to get the rest of the firm to pay attention and give the contact centre the revenue-generating respect it deserves.
1. Valuable Call Logging Data
The big bosses will love hearing about all the fantastic new insights you’re gleaning from sophisticated call recording and logging software. If you don’t have a system you love yet, the execs should know investing in call recording and logging software can provide you with extremely specific info about what’s not working within your organization as a whole – not just the contact centre.
Refer to the following example. Let’s say you want to implement call quality recording technology to help you evaluate calls, improve agents and increase FCR. The example calculation below assumes you want to achieve a modest 2% increase in yout current FCR rates.
A call recording system can help in the following ways:
- Higher assessment precision then live monitoring by levergaging tracnsaction play back functions.
- Agents who have particular aptitude for resolving calls and emails on a first contact basis can be recorded and used as examples of the proper method to resolve the initial contact.
- When you receive the call recording system quotas from your short list vendors, you can compare them to the savings above to determine ROI.
2. Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
This is an interesting metric to throw at the execs; NPS is a measure of your customers’ likelihood to recommend your firm to their families, associates, and larger social networks.
3. Focus Your Funding
Remember that any increase in investment in client service endeavors should be specific, just like your examination of contact centre ROI. Don’t throw money at the wall; know what metrics are most crucial and focus your attention there.
4. Think Differently
Rather than just knowing that you want to generally improve your client service level with greater investment, think about clearly defined measures that make the case for this improvement. Is gaining a loyal customer the optimal return? What about intent to repeat a purchase? Focus on a clear objective and then trace your financial investment through the customer service chain to see its return.
5. Help Them Help You
Many times the top brass just can’t trace the link between their budgetary allocation to your client service centre and the corresponding increase in profits. Help them “get it” by providing them with good data on stats like service level and first call resolution.
6. Feeling Social?
Are you expected to include upgrades in social media customer service efforts into your overall contact centre ROI? If so, be sure to separate technology investments by channel so you can carefully track spending. Execs may be excited to hear about social media ROI as social is all anyone can talk about these days.
7. The Case for Outsourcing
Sometimes a conversation about your call centre’s ROI might be helped by considering the case for bringing in third-party contact centre support. By helping you manage staffing levels with precision and limit expenditures on unnecessary in-house labor, you may be able to reallocate some contact centre resources and show improving ROI. A business process outsourcer can work with your team to agree on a payment structure that will contain the costs of bringing them on.
8. Know Your Dashboard
The execs will want to hear about how their investments in contact centre technology have empowered you to view all interactions and trace each customer service event from one central interface. Use it, know it, share it with the guys and gals upstairs.
9. Express ROI in Operational Savings
Take a different tactic and make the case for operational savings achieved by investing in client service. Your agents point out weaknesses, put out fires, and prevent customer attrition. Ka-ching!
10. Talk ABC
Consider the activity-based costing analysis, an approach for analyzing cost by separating every bit of your contact centre’s operation into activities and the individual tasks that comprise them. This approach gives great specificity and can really make a difference when trying to calculate the ROI on contact centre-specific improvements.
To get the head honchos on board with understanding your contact centre’s ROI, you have to take an inventive approach. Service metrics are like Latin to folks whose internal monologue is strictly numbers. For more insights on how to get really specific with contact centre data, read our free white paper, “Guide to Measuring and Analyzing Call Types.”
