If your in-house contact center profits aren't meeting your expectations, it's time to take a look at ways to reduce call center costs.

Call Center Cost Savings Ideas

There are a wide range of call center costs associated with hiring employees to manage, run, and perform contact center operations in-house. But when you need a team in-house to handle your customer service needs, it's hard to find ways to save.

Explore the call center cost reduction strategies below to help you get started:

Assess Your Metrics With Machine Learning

Machine learning can easily identify which call center metrics have the biggest effect on your company’s bottom line. Once you identify the ones that make or break your cash flow, you can focus on benchmarking them and find ways to save by boosting scores, while also tracking improvements and relevant costs. By using machine learning for analysis, you can gain a better understanding of how to reduce call center costs while providing a better customer experience.

Boost First Contact Resolution Rates

Improving your First Call Resolution (FCR) rate is a key way to reduce call center costs and improve the customer experience. Training your advisors is one way to improve FCR rates, but technological solutions can also help. By incorporating expert collaboration tools into your advisors' workflow, you can get quick, accurate answers to any customer query. Additionally, with the aid of speech analytics, you can gain insight into the topics of conversation and the outcomes of each customer interaction. These methods can help you gain deeper insight into customer conversations, provide more accurate responses, and reduce costs by helping customers resolve issues quicker.

Reduce Average Handling Times

Finding ways to reduce Average Handling Times (AHT) without compromising the customer experience is an ongoing challenge for contact center managers—but it can be done. One way is by providing advisors with access to shortcut tools to help them complete tasks faster without sacrificing quality of service. For digital channels, having a library of pre-written replies is a great way to speed up response times. Using resources like prewritten replies can also provide consistency in customer service and reduce call center costs.

Minimize Technology Vendors

When you're operating call center operations in-house, it's important to work with technology vendors to ensure your agents have the best tools to serve customers. However, with so many providing different services, it's easy to get bogged down with technology platforms and processes, which often leads to costly investments. One way to ensure your contact center remains cost effective while still delivering great service is to consolidate your technology platforms. You can work with fewer vendors who can provide you with everything you need to operate successfully. Additionally, agents and supervisors can more easily navigate different systems by reducing the amount of time spent switching between programs. Working with fewer technology providers also requires less training on new technologies and allows you to take advantage of bundle pricing, saving money in the long run.

If keeping up with customer service inquiries is becoming difficult, it may be time to consider hiring a call center—but how do you choose the right one?

Listen to Your Customers

Customer feedback is essential to gauge satisfaction and identify potential opportunities for improvement. But how can you make sure you’re collecting feedback without being too invasive? The answer lies in creative technology. By integrating customer feedback tools into your systems, you give customers the opportunity to share vital intelligence without being overly intrusive. With easy ways for customers to provide you with feedback, you can save money and become more efficient by leveraging customer insight.

Build Your Processes Around Customer Needs

Using self-service options can be an effective way to reduce costs and meet your customers' needs. In fact, research shows that customers are willing to embrace self-service for simple, repetitive tasks. For example, they may be more than happy to check their order status or make changes to an existing order online rather than asking an agent to do it for them. When customers take care of easy tasks themselves, it frees up your agents to focus on more complex inquiries where their communication skills can make all the difference.

Outsource Your Call Center Needs

Partnering with a nearshore call center can help reduce your call center costs, boost productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. Since professional call centers are equipped with the latest technology to provide a superior customer experience, you don't have to worry about vendor costs, training, office supplies, fees, and commissions. Nearshore call centers also hire highly-trained agents who work faster and more efficiently than newly hired employees, resulting in even more call center savings for you.

Reduce Call Center Costs With ListenTrust

Reducing call center costs is easy with ListenTrust. Our nearshore center is headquartered in Portland, Maine, and operated in Mexico where we employ over 800 highly skilled English and Spanish speaking live agents. With our help, you can experience call center cost savings by letting us take on recruiting, onboarding, and training. Our technology supports remote agent expansion and with existing strategic partnerships, we can provide overflow capacity of up to an additional 2,000 bilingual agents. On top of that, we have the team, facility space, IT support, and phone service solutions to take care of your customer service needs. We save you time, money, and hassle while providing you with the best customer service available. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help reduce your call center costs.