Reducing cost per call while outsourcing your inbound, outbound, and telemarketing calls is generally high on the to-do list. Being a manager or executive, implementing strategies that reduce cost per call should not come at the expense of customer service quality. Instead, reducing cost per call requires a balance between optimizing call center resources, customer service quality, and staffing as lean as possible.
Here are a few frequently used terms that you should use to reduce cost per call in a call center without hampering customer service quality. Call center staff calculator is a great resource for managers and executives aiming to reduce cost per call in their call center in the right way.
What’s the Cost per Call?
The cost per call refers to the total cost associated with the handling of all calls or contacts during a specific duration. It is a KPI that is frequently used by the call center managers to assess the efficiency within the call center. Before we dive deep into how to reduce cost per call in the call center, let’s first chat about how to calculate cost per call.
How to Calculate Cost per Call?
The first step to calculate the cost per call is defining the time period for which you would like to calculate the cost per call. For example, cost per hour, cost per day, cost per month, cost per quarter, cost per year, and so on. Once you decide the concrete time, it is most effective to acquire the number of contacts during that particular time period for a particular channel including phone, text, video, live chat, email, support tickets, fax, and others.
Next, you need to calculate the total call center costs that are associated with a particular time. This includes the operational costs like rent, management, the salaries of all customer executives, the call center software cost, business tools cost.
Finally, you need to divide the total cost for the particular time by the total number of calls outsourced in that period. The result will be the cost per call. You can also determine the cost per call with a call center calculator.
What Is the Call Center Staff Calculator?
Call center staffing calculator is used to improve the overall performance by determining the staffing requirement for various times of day, days of the week and weeks of the month. The inbound and outbound call center work differently and achieve different objectives of the company. They should have the appropriate number of resources to reach certain specified targets.
- Outbound call centers need to consider metrics to set the number of planned calls per hour. They need to achieve their decided average call duration to determine the number of executives required for the campaign.
- Inbound call centers need to establish a traffic model by considering the number of calls expected per hour and service level targets in order to determine how many customer executives are required at different times throughout the day.
The company should also consider other necessary information like an average number of calls, the average handling capacity of each executive and the arrival or outgoing rate of calls per day. The call center staff calculator will help you to calculate the call volumes, average call load, and average wait time. Based on the calculator, you can determine the necessary number of lines, abandonment rate, a number of agents required and scheduling the shift coverage to meet your targets.
Frequently Used Terms in Call Center Pricing Discussions
The call center staffing model works on a specific algorithm, which helps you to estimate the number of customer executives you need in your call center for outbound or inbound campaigns.
Here are the frequently used terms that are vital for determining the pricing factor for your call center. These terms offer certain basic information about service level, average speed, and call abandonment.
- Minimum service level: It shows the minimum percentage of service calls required to be answered in a specific time.
- Average handling time: The average handling time should be the average length of time in seconds that handled or completed calls last.
- Average patience time: It displays the average length of time in seconds, which elapses before the call is abandoned.
- Service level interval: It determines the length of time in seconds, which is allotted to service calls.
- Maximum abandonment rate: It refers to the maximum percentage of calls that can be abandoned by the caller.
- The average speed of answer: The average time in seconds to answer the calls which are in wait in the service queue before being answered.
How to Reduce Cost per Call With the Call Center Staff Calculator?
Now you have a comprehensive understanding of how to calculate the FTE requirement and what are the factors affecting your cost per call. Here are a few tips which help you to further reduce
your cost per call without compromising with your customer service quality.
- Optimize the hiring and training time for your customer executives. You can achieve this by hiring agents who are well-suited for the position, training employees to excel and providing consistent feedback based on their performance.
- Maintaining an excellent team of call center agents in-house to reduce cost per call requires more than a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Make sure your agents are providing top-notch service to their customers.
- Leverage the best call center software features to enhance agent performance to decrease the cost per call.
- The relevant information such as call logs, chat transcripts, tickets and salesforce cases should be in the same interface, so that the agents won’t have to dig through multiple systems for finding information.
- Optimize business tools that agents can utilize for better interactions with customers.
- Make sure your team uses the best call center software, which will have a direct impact on reducing the cost per call.
- Optimize and enhance the rate of customer satisfaction, which ultimately decreases the cost per call.
Final thoughts
Companies saved on more operational costs and drove more revenue with the help of the call center staff calculator. You need to schedule staff according to their needs and goals. Call centers with excess staff will have an unnecessary expense, while understaffed call centers will make a situation where staff members can’t meet certain goals. The Call center staff calculator helps you to determine the objectives of your call center and keep the organization from efficiently satisfying callers.
