Price vs ROI – Flexibility is important when choosing a contact center. Mistakes add up quickly – and easily exceed the initial savings. If you make the wrong choice, you will be locked in and your business will suffer permanently.

Ease of procurement and deployment can mask problems that cause serious impact on operating costs.

It all sounds so easy – with a few clicks on a website you can buy a service, set up an account and you’ll have 10 or 20 agents ready when the phones start ringing. A pretty website, great marketing, attractive interface (hopefully not fake). What else do you need?

But stop and think for a moment. What problems have you actually solved? And are you getting ROI?

The biggest cost in most contact centers is staffing, and real ROI comes when savings or increased effectiveness are achieved in this area. As you probably know, delivering calls to the wrong agents is one of the biggest money burners in the contact center. A simple click-to-dial and screen pop-up solution for your CRM system will not solve this task. Calls will still be routed to the wrong agents if the information stored in your business process systems is not used to make intelligent routing decisions.

Let’s illustrate this with a typical scenario we solved for one of our customers:

• B2B customers need to be directed to a specific department depending on their status – to a specific specialized group of agents depending on the products they sell – to the B2B support group when they call about an open trouble ticket
• B2C customers and unknown callers are routed to the general service group where their needs are further qualified.

Let’s say you have 20 employees, and each employee costs an average of €3500 per month (all costs included). Incorrect routing means you lost 5250 EUR every month. And that doesn’t even include employee vacation and sick time and other costs. This number will be even higher in most companies.

30% of calls (that’s 27 live calls) per day resulted in an incorrect transfer, which cost 27 minutes per agent per day to resolve. Or 9.45 hours per month based on 21 working days. Or to put it more simply: 7.5% of personnel costs.

Real contact center software helps you solve these problems. So don’t go for a cheap, glossy solution without taking another look at how a professional contact center solution can really help you.