5 Ways to Cut Your Operating Costs

Darren Deehan looks at 5 ways you can cut operating expenditure in your contact centre.

A recent report by Contact Babel, ‘The Inner Circle Guide to Cloud-based Contact Centre Solutions’, looked at the use of cloud applications by contact centres in the UK.

Here are 5 ways contact centres can cut operating expenditure by using cloud contact centre applications – and in particular workforce management.

1. Optimising schedules

Agent salaries are the biggest proportion of costs, at an average of 64% of operating expenses. You can cut this cost by introducing optimised schedules powered by cloud workforce management (WFM), and get more from less by having agents in the right place at the right time.

Typically, contact centres can target an improvement of scheduling efficiency of 10-20% with WFM. However, a very conservative savings estimate can still result in a cost saving. If we presume, for example, a contact centre with 100 agents earning on average £15,000pa. That’s a wage bill of £1.5m. A very conservative target of only 3% will return £45,000 in annual savings.

2. IT maintenance

IT is certainly not a huge proportion of overall costs, coming in just under 4%, but ask any Financial Controller if they would like to reduce overall costs by 1 or 2% and see their reaction.

With cloud applications typically available through a browser, with some minimal set-up at network level, this can mean the end of IT maintenance.

There is no need to purchase or manage large servers, thus lowering Cap-ex costs of any initial investments in software licensing and hardware as well as the associated Op-ex of any ongoing maintenance contracts.

Any upgrades pushed by the cloud vendor are typically done free of charge and available without any assistance from the IT department. A 22% rate means that for a £100k software licence, a company pays an annual fee of £22,000 for service packs, product enhancements, and some services.

3. Management and IT salaries

If there is a lot less IT maintenance, there will be less demand for resources from the IT department, typically a cost-heavy department. Management and IT salaries account for 11.5% on average.

Development and implementation costs decrease as cloud providers usually provide this as part of the service. Services demanded by the operation can be instantly accessible direct from the cloud vendor.

Also, moving applications to the cloud can help in multi-site operations – there is less of a requirement for on-site IT specialists, as there is less physical hardware on site to maintain.

4. Training

With traditional on-premise software deployments, training needs to be carried out on site. 1-2-1 training is great, but this comes at a premium. The subject matter expert has to get in their car and drive around the country clocking up huge expenses, and there then can only be a limited amount of people one trainer can see in one week.

However, modern cloud software applications are designed with intuitive user interfaces for a greater user experience, reducing learning time.

Typically with cloud applications, training can be carried out remotely, often to more than one person at a time. Cloud vendors gain the economies of scale and pass those savings on to customers by reducing training costs – and often there is no cost at all.

5. Recruitment

With effective workforce planning, contact centres report a lower attrition rate as agents’ time is used more effectively.

Agents suffer less burn-out from working shifts which are clearly understaffed – as well as less boredom from working overstaffed shifts. Recruitment costs vary, but one recent estimate suggests an average in the UK may be as much as £30k!

This sounds like a ridiculous figure, but it is based on all associated costs and taking into account the estimated time it takes to optimum productivity.

With thanks to Darren Deehan at injixo