Contact center cost savings: Doing more with less

As the economic climate shifts from one of growth to one of uncertainty, contact centers are coming under increased pressure to cut costs and increase efficiencies and productivity.

Meanwhile, organizations strive to continuously improve customer service. They also continue to contend with a global skills shortage that limits the ability to properly staff the contact center to meet the ever-increasing number of calls, resulting in unacceptably long hold times and an extremely poor customer experience.

Contact centers that proactively find ways to do more with less while continuing to raise the bar on customer experience are best equipped to handle uncertain economic conditions as well as fluctuations in labor availability and are uniquely positioned to react and capitalize early during an economic recovery.

Cost savings and customer experience are not mutually exclusive.

Rather, they go hand in hand in a way that benefits both the contact center as well as the customers it serves. And while that may seem counterintuitive, they really aren’t. Measures taken to reduce costs and increase efficiencies have a positive impact on the overall customer experience because they continue to lower the effort it takes for customers to do business with you, while at the same time making an agent’s job that much easier.

So how does this work? Over the coming months, we’ll share some key insights and actionable materials for contact center leaders that will show you how you can leverage modern-day contact center technology to improve both the customer and the agent experience while driving down costs and improving efficiencies. More specifically, we will share playbooks and ideas around:

• Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to automate voice and digital interactions for the most common use cases so that customers can resolve their issues quickly.
• AI-driven agent assistance so that they can move quickly to address customer issues and get their jobs done more efficiently and effectively.
• Expanded voice self-service so that customers can get their issues resolved quickly without having to wait on hold or wait for a callback to speak with an agent.
• A roadmap for digital transformation to enable a digital-first approach to customer service coupled with call deflection to digital channel strategies.
• Leveraging workforce engagement tools to more effectively manage and engage your contact center agents.
• Consolidating your contact center technology stack to realize significant savings.
• Leveraging BPO partners to dynamically scale your contact center when extra staffing is needed.

While implementing one or some of these playbooks will help, it is the combination of all of the recommendations which will ensure that your contact center is operating as efficiently as possible, significantly driving down costs, with improvements that will substantially reduce customer effort and improve the customer experience.

To get you started, we’ve put together a curated selection of resources for leaders to help get you started on your journey towards optimizing your contact center. By accessing the contact center cost savings resource collection, you will receive:

• A comprehensive guide to reduce costs and improve efficiency in the contact center—Get strategies that will help you kickstart efficiency improvements and cost reductions in your contact center.
• Five cost-saving steps for implementing an AI-powered virtual agent—Simple steps on leveraging a virtual agent to handle the most common interactions without needing an agent.
• How to prioritize CX in a cost-cutting environment—Keep CX and CX improvements top of mind as you go through your cost optimization exercise.
• Call deflection to digital channels: tactics for cost-savings—Strategies for deflecting a larger number of calls to digital channels for faster resolution of customer issues.

From here, stay tuned as we begin to share more playbooks, open up masterclasses, and provide more opportunities to implement clear and compelling strategies to enable your contact center to continue to thrive regardless of the economic circumstances.