Measuring Marketing ROI: 4 Elements You Need in Your Call Centre

How to discover exactly what marketing efforts make your contact centre’s phones ring and which ones are not worth the investment.

Ah, the unassuming call centre; quietly working keeping things running whether it is the dead of night or Christmas morning. Some organizations don’t give the customer service sector its rightful respect, thinking of the client service centre as more of a touchy-feely part of the company than a revenue generator. However, even if your contact centre principally handles service calls, it’s absolutely a vital part of the way your organization does business and generates profits.

Consider this statistic: business experts Murphy and Murphy report in their book Leading on the Edge of Chaos that a mere 5 percent reduction in customer defection may increase your organization’s profit margins by up to 125 percent! If anyone is still on the fence about the importance of a top-notch client service operation, they’re clearly missing the boat. But what if you need to measure marketing ROI in your contact centre? Where do you start?

Here are a few important considerations for institutions hoping to capture and leverage marketing ROI statistics from the client service centre. These factors will help businesses make the most of contact centre analytics and discover key information about their customer base they might otherwise have missed.

1. Invest in a Quality CRM Platform

Your contact centre’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a crucial tool for tracking your company’s relationship with its customers — current and prospective clients alike. The ROI for CRM platform implementation or upgrade is astounding; without a quality CRM system it’s difficult to track your business’ marketing ROI. There are a variety of CRM systems for every level of business, from small online companies to enterprise firms. Consider investing in or upgrading your existing CRM platform to capture the returns on individual marketing investments across multiple channels.

2. Use Excellent Call Labeling and Measuring Software

Your contact centre needs a good telephone software system to track, label, and measure every type of incoming call. Perhaps your business advertises on a variety of channels? A smart telephone software system will help you assign unique phone numbers for each origin source, label incoming calls, and measure them so you can easily capture marketing ROI. Without call tracking, you’re missing crucial elements of the marketing equation because you can’t determine why the phones ring and where rising call volume originates.

3. Ask

This simple, no-cost step to measuring marketing ROI in your call centre is a cinch: get your agents to ask each and every caller how they heard about your company. It doesn’t take expensive marketing analytics software to implement this system, but the insights captured may prove exceedingly valuable. Ask and ye shall receive!

4. Rethink Your Approach

It’s important to remember that other sectors of your company outside the client service centre likely measure value and ROI in different terms. As a contact centre manager, you measure success in terms of improving operational performance: improving first call resolution (FCR); decreasing hold times; boosting service level. However, your company as a whole likely focuses on the hard numbers: they want to see increased profits and decreased costs — period.

When working on measuring marketing ROI in your contact centre, remember to remind both yourself and the rest of your institution that this type of data analysis may require a paradigm shift on both sides in order to accurately assess how your contact centre is performing.

When measuring marketing ROI for your call centre, it’s important to keep in mind how crucial the customer service function is for the overall organization of which your niche is a vital part. The contact centre can contribute valuable data on marketing ROI using smart technology like an upgraded CRM module and telephone software for call measuring and labeling. For more information on how to capture important customer data in your telephone service centre, download our free white paper.