How to save money on your contact center

It has been a busy year for contact centers, with businesses trying to give everyone a slight degree of normality during the lockdown.

Unfortunately, that benefit, like all essential business expenses, can get out of control quickly. Thankfully, we’ve been helping out contact center companies and their providers for quite some time, so we’ve put together a few bits of the money-saving advice that we typically offer them:

Move to the cloud

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a hundred times. Switching to a cloud subscription model for communications is a cost saver that has the potential to slash your IT spend dramatically.

According to Gartner IT departments spend more than 30% of their total budget on communications. Companies (but not enough in our eyes) are replacing the need for significant hardware investment with more sustainable monthly subscription costs like a cloud-based PBX or softphone solution.

Replacing the major capital expenditure that comes with setting up an on-prem solution, and creating a much lower cost and more manageable operational expenditure.

Take a look at other ways that moving your communications to the cloud can cut your overall comms costs.

Consolidate your communications suppliers

If you operate out of a few different countries, your comms setup probably consists of contracts with dozens of service providers for a global communications footprint.

By consolidating your comms, you’re either going to be increasing your capability, or decreasing your costs.

Not only that but if providers offer volume-based discounts that grow as you scale, consolidating your minutes onto those networks will allow you to access deeper discounts.

Having one supplier for your comms means that you might not even need to change supplier, or find a new supplier every time you look to adjust your comms capabilities.

And with a single carrier to take care of all your coverage needs, you’ll eliminate all the pricey overheads that come with multiple contracts and paperwork.

That’s an enormous saving in resources and makes your comms adaptable to your business growth, things you can’t afford to lose out on in the current climate.

Here’s a look at what a good global carrier looks like.

Optimize your CPaaS with BYOC

According to Nemertes Research, both operational costs and access to the PSTN are higher when you use bundled telephony with a CPaaS or UCaaS provider.

There’s also the fact that if your carrier services are part of your CPaaS, you’re not in charge of contract negotiations, coverage areas, or which services you’re paying for. And those are some big sacrifices to make in the long run.

The solution is ‘BYOC’, a term we’ve been blogging about a lot.

It’s the ability to ‘Bring Your Own Carrier’ to a platform of your choice to provide underlying voice and messaging functionality. In effect, mixing and matching your suppliers to:

• Maintain control of your call routing
• Extend coverage to more markets through diversifying your network suppliers
• Get greater assurances over connection quality and avoid short-term regulatory issues
• Get the most value from your CPaaS

Take a look at how you can take advantage of BYOC.

Automation and APIs

Time is money, and the man-hours you can save using programmatic and automated comms can save you a boatload down the line.

Using an API gives you the ability to automate a number of functions that would otherwise require a large manual overhead including:

• Submission of the required information to regulators
• Understanding any local service restrictions on use cases around phone numbers
• Number porting
• Local access to emergency services
• Verify end user details

Annoyingly, some countries like using APIs, and some lie using CSVs, making automation inconsistent. But for the most part, once you have your APIs set up, they can help save you on both time and money.

Here’s a look at some of our APIs.

Check for sub-standard call quality

Owning every touchpoint with your customers, building on the data from every interaction, and making it easy to get seamless support across devices means creating new value for your business and owning the sweet spot between customer experience and customer service.

In an age of increasingly commoditized VoIP services, CX becomes a major differentiating factor, so ensuring consistently high quality on your phone lines is of paramount importance.

If you want to keep an eye on the quality of your calls you’ll normally have to fork out for expensive third-party tools or network infrastructure equipment.

As a result, you can troubleshoot quality issues and quickly improve the CX your customers are getting.