You’ve read about the features and benefits of your outbound call center software, and it all sounds great. You’re ready to buy, but there’s one lingering question: how will I know if it’s working? Calculating the return-on-investment (ROI) on your outbound call center solution is essential. It’s also not as difficult as it might seem.
In its simplest form, your return-on-investment is the difference between the amount of revenue you’re able to get from your outbound call center software subtracted from the amount you pay for your outbound call center. But knowing your call center’s ROI and maximizing it are two different goals. Bright Pattern’s call center solution is designed to enable fast ROI, we design our call center solutions to enable maximum ROI. Let’s look at how we do that.
What Is an Outbound Call Center?
When you think of a call center, you’re probably envisioning calls, chats, texts, and emails coming in. That’s an inbound call center. An outbound, then, is one that sends calls, chats, texts, and emails out to customers. It’s a proactive rather than reactive communication tool. There are many reasons why an outbound call center increases your call center ROI.
The Price of an Outbound Call Center
Certainly, there are expenses to be used in your call center ROI calculator. These expenses include license and deployment costs. You’ll want to ensure pricing is flexible and not so long-term that you can’t pivot or adjust if needed. Flexible packages and optional add-ons can also help you choose the level right for your organization. In addition to these literal costs, don’t forget that time is money. An outbound call center solution’s ROI is affected by its time to implement. The faster your solution is up and running, the quicker you start to take advantage of its features to reap its benefits.
The Value of an Outbound Call Center
When considering your outbound call center ROI, First looking at the value it brings will help you determine the metrics for calculating its ROI. While price is certainly a consideration, it shouldn’t be the sole factor. When outbound call centers don’t have the technologies to offer the most efficient capabilities, they’ll fall short and hurt your contact center’s ROI.
Ideally, you’re implementing an outbound contact center that leverages artificial intelligence, algorithms, and automation. This is how you ensure optimal efficiency and productivity. Your business maximizes its ROI on call center outbound services with capabilities such as appointment-setting, prospecting, supporting marketing efforts, market research, outbound marketing, telemarketing, B2B and B2C sales, and lead generation.
The true value of a cloud-based omnichannel outbound call center can be summed up in 3 main goals:
- Reliable, future-protected systems
- Efficient, satisfied workforce
- Satisfied, retained customer base
The key to all of these goals is using innovative technology, such as AI-powered dialers, solid caller ID reputation management, and real-time, easy-to-use reporting tools.
Artificial Intelligence Fuels Your Call Center ROI
Outbound contact centers offer numerous benefits to maximize your contact center ROI. Most are tied to your customer service agent’s productivity. In order to make your agents more productive, you need to remove mundane tasks. Only then are they free to tackle the higher level servicing of the customer’s experience. While it’s a simple concept, it’s a complex endeavor. It has to be done in ways that couple technology with a human touch if customers are going to trust you. Trust and transparency are fundamental.
AI-Powered Dialers Are Central to Call Center ROI
So much about an outbound call center’s ROI centers around the dialers. They’re one of the greatest outcomes of leveraging artificial intelligence. You can, for example, set up automation like predictive dialers to help representatives reach a large audience of qualified leads quickly. Predictive and auto dialers dial for them, eliminating the time it takes for a representative to dial manually.
Imagine the time savings. Instead of spending their time — and wasting their skills — on administrative tasks, your sales team and customer services professionals can focus solely on clients and buyers. This isn’t the only kind of dialer available.
With advanced dialing algorithms, powerful call center tools, and modern dialer technologies, you’ll see an immediate ROI on your call center solution. Bright Pattern’s award-winning auto dialer software is powered by artificial intelligence. Options include the predictive dialer, progressive dialer, preview dialer, and automatic interactive voice response (IVR) modes. These innovative technologies increase productivity by dialing the phone for them, skipping unanswered calls, and letting them leave voicemail messages quickly. They empower your customer to find answers to basic questions without even needing to engage a customer service representative. Live calls and voicemails can be automatically transferred to other channels within your contact center solution in real time. In addition to improving your organization’s workflow, you upgrade your customer’s experience.
Contact Center ROI Relies on Caller ID Reputation
The biggest challenge with outbound communications is often ensuring it actually reaches its intended receiver. Mobile technology revolutionized the way we communicate, even in terms of just phone calls. With its built-in caller ID, people can see if they know the number. The last thing you want is your calls flagged as spam. If your intended receiver gets that message, they’re not going to answer it, and you may burn through leads quickly. That’s where caller ID reputation management comes in. You’ll want to make sure your outbound call center solution helps you see which calls or texts aren’t being received so you can adjust quickly.
Optimizing Your Call Center ROI With Reporting
An area often left out of ROI discussions is the reporting capabilities. Quality assurance is essential to maximizing any investment you make, especially when it comes to customer satisfaction. It’s more expensive to capture a new client than it is to retain a current one. It’s also more expensive to generate leads via marketing dollars than it is via personal recommendations and referrals. In short, the happier and more satisfied your customers are, the more likely they are to return to tell others to patronize your business.
Your call center can be a lean, automated, well-oiled machine, but if your customers aren’t happy, your contact center’s ROI will be fleeting. Quality assurance gives your managers real-time insight into the minute-by-minute experience throughout your call center. Everything we’ve talked about, from productivity to customer satisfaction, can be assessed, adjusted, and optimized through an easy-to-use, omnichannel quality assurance system.
