For a call center business, everything revolves around the customer satisfaction indicator. So, how does one achieve this customer satisfaction? Through technology? Partially yes. You need to have an efficient customer service agent (CSA) and the technology working harmoniously to gain that customer satisfaction and most importantly the precious ROI (Return on Investment)
While you can train a customer service agent to be more effective and efficient, the application of technology requires a different approach. What kind of technology does your call center business need, and what impact does this technology have on your business’s ROI?
We will look at the ROI of cloud call center software and what factors you need to consider to evaluate the ROI of call center software tailored to your business.
ROI of Call Center Software – How to Calculate?
With simple calculations and data like total income, total expense, and total investment cost, you can calculate the ROI for any business.
ROI = (total income – total expense) / total investment cost
Now, most ROI is in percentage, so take the calculated ROI and multiply it by 100. It gives you the ROI in percentage.
As said, it is easy to calculate ROI, if you have all the data. Now, collecting data is the biggest hurdle.
Calculating the ROI for call center software is complex, as factors associated with the software are not solely based on numerical data. Meaning, you need to have quantitative factors that help to find the ROI for your software. The following factors will allow you to quantify elements, facilitating the determination of your call center software’s ROI.
1. Current Cost of the Operation
The first step in calculating the ROI of your call center software is to determine the existing operational cost.
Include all the factors such as infrastructure cost, hardware, and associated costs, software cost, employee salary, maintenance cost, and miscellaneous costs for your business. The accumulated cost helps you to understand the basic framework and the goals of your current state of business.
Once you have the framework, identify what you can achieve by investing in a new call center software. What is your new goal expected from the software?
These goals can be anything, such as great customer satisfaction, or even reduced operation cost.
2. Identify KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
This fundamental framework assists in identifying areas where improvements can be implemented It also helps in measuring how call center software increases efficiency.
For instance, you can automate the generic and automatic process or even streamline the whole operation. For call center businesses, significant challenges include lengthy call handling times and inefficient routing processes.
Identify how the call center software addresses these key challenges. Take the bad routing process as an example. If the CSA doing the manual routing, then it takes time. With software, you can do intelligent call routing at a fraction of the current time, which helps achieve a good customer experience.
Once you determine the KPIs, make them quantifiable. Such as customer satisfaction indicators, and CSA performance.
3. Option for Scalability
Call center operations are dynamic. Evaluate your current situation, particularly how your team manages fluctuation, and how these processes can be improved with the aid of call center software. Software features with the omni channel support.
Leveraging omni-channel support, you can intelligently route the calls which can help you to resolve the fluctuations. Measure how much you can gain from the flexibility of the software. Flexibility can be anything from training and onboarding new hires to real-time performance trackers.
Compare the benefits of the software’s scalability to your current processes, ensuring these are quantifiable to accurately measure the ROI of your software investment.
4. Option for Integration
For a call center to perform efficiently and effectively, data is important. Determine how the call center software brings more data for improvement. And one of the best ways to collect various data is through integration such as CRM.
The ability to integrate sophisticated CRM with the software can bring you more quantifiable data (time-saving and cost-saving data factors) for better customer experience, which then you can use to determine the ROI.
5. CSA Training Cost
Implementation of new software always requires training for the CSA. Assess the level of training and support required for the CSA to adapt to the new ecosystem. Measure how well CSAs learn the new software and how it impacts the time taken to solve the customer issue. Determine if extra infrastructure or documentation is required for efficient training and take that into account for calculating the ROI.
Once you have gathered the quantifiable data, you can ascertain the benefits that the software brings to your operations. Compare the data against the investment that you are projecting for the software implementation. The final answer is the theoretical ROI of your call center software.
After deploying the software, measure the total income. With the data for the income, expenses, and total investment and using the formula, get the actual ROI. Compare both theoretical and actual ROI and ultimately check whether the choice you made is a correct one or not.
FAQs
- How do you evaluate the software ROI?
To calculate ROI for software, divide the total income (profit) by the investment cost. This gives you an accurate ROI so long as the data you gathered determine income and investment.
- What is a good ROI for businesses?
ROI can vary depending on the type and scale of businesses. For an average-sized business, 7-9% of ROI can be a good starting point to measure baseline growth.
- What are the factors of ROI?
Some of the major factors that can be used to determine the ROI of a business include:
- The current cost of the operations
- Performance indicators
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Features integration and
- Training cost.
Final Thoughts
ROI is very important for a business regardless of type and scale. If you are going to implement a new workflow such as software integration, it is best to measure the benefits of the call center software and how it can resolve the existing problems. Quantifying the benefits helps you to determine how much you are going to gain for your investment with great improvement on the business goals. Read more
