They want to know the return on investment (ROI) of making a switch, how long it will take to recoup the investment and what the real total cost of ownership is.
Measuring the ROI isn’t as difficult as you might think if you consider the key costs as well as the value it creates.
The demands on your contact centre can fluctuate—on a daily basis, with seasonal variation, and with business changes over the medium term. But traditional on-premise contact centres means your costs are fixed.
For one of our global customers, their peak in demand was 40 per cent higher than average. When they built their contact centre, they designed it to cope with an extra 20 per cent, meaning that half their capacity went unused in an average month.
Cloud-based contact centres allow you to flex your capacity. For example, a global logistics company saw a 50 per cent increase in inbound calls in the days following Black Friday. We doubled the MPLS capacity in just four hours in order to cope with the incremental traffic.
There are three main investment costs that need to be considered:
When I ask customers how many agents they will have in the future, few tell me that it will be more than they have today. But no one can really predict how many it will be. The fact that cloud contact centres can flex down is just as important as it being able to flex up with demand increases. It means from a cost perspective, customers aren’t having to bet on the future.
The reason most organisations look at moving to a cloud model is to cut costs. A faster, more reliable platform can lead to fewer dropped calls and faster issue resolution, with a significant improvement in first contact resolution rates. This leads to increased agent efficiency, which, in turn, leads to lowered costs in the form of less agents required to handle all of your traffic.
A virtual infrastructure eliminates many of the expenses and headaches of managing your own data centres, eliminating fixed investment in real estate, hardware, and other physical assets while also reducing the cost of headcount and ongoing support. You can go live much faster than with an on-premises model, and you’ll start to earn revenue immediately due to your speedier spin-up.
By redesigning the customer journey to improve the experience of customers and agents, you should also be able to improve productivity, with lower agent handling times, improved performance monitoring and collaboration for faster, more efficient results.
Calculate the ROI of your move to the cloud and manage fluctuating demands.