Tips for Designing a Profitable Contact Center

Let’s assume that right now, your business does not have a dedicated contact center. Right now you have a blank slate to start with, and money to spend. And you are wondering about whether it’s a good idea to move forward with a contact center for your business. Is it really something that your organization can afford?

First and foremost, you absolutely need a contact center. The decisions that you make while acquiring one, though, will either come back to haunt you later or generate strong returns for years to come.

A contact center, in other words, can be notoriously expensive after factoring in things like staff and labor, technology, overhead, maintenance, and telecommunications costs. Many contact centers — specifically large, in-house operations — tend to burn through much more revenue than they bring in.  Owning a contact center can quickly turn into a major money pit for an organization.

Understand, though, that it’s possible to design a modern, effective, high quality contact center at a price that aligns with your business’s budget.

Here are some things that you can do to operate a profitable contact center:

Minimize overhead: It’s not the look or feel of your building or office that will determine whether your contact center is profitable in the long run. So it’s okay to be cheap and even thrifty with your setup. Your facility, in other words, does not have to resemble a Silicon Valley startup office. Spend money on the bare essentials, and look for ways to trim down waste. This is also true from a technology startup. Only purchase technologies that can significantly help your agents, and pass on some of the flashy, expensive cutting-edge solutions that you see.

 Be smart about what you buy: This is not to say you should be cheap about the communications equipment that you use. By all means, give your agents high quality equipment that will be bug-free and they will feel comfortable using. But be wary of vendors offering fancy new contact center technologies. At the end of the day, your don’t need much more than the basics to do a great job — such as a reliable phone system, a customer service/ customer relationship management platform, a high quality headset and of course analytics.

Outsource operations: Keep in mind that it’s one thing to come up with a budget and plan to control costs in your contact center. But it’s quite another thing to achieve real cost savings while operating your own facility. There will always be unexpected expenses to face like high employee turnover, equipment upgrades, utilities and more. By outsourcing your contact center operations, though, you will avoid many of these costs while also receiving guaranteed results.