Low Hanging Fruit: Is Your 3rd Party Overflow Call Center Cost Effective?
I spent this morning talking with a good friend who is the COO of a midsized business to business multichannel company. I wanted to get his take on what data and analysis they use at an executive level to make decisions and to develop strategies. He made a point that is something we believe very strongly in, and it didn’t take tens of thousands of dollars to make a $200,000 difference. It took a few weeks and very little effort from the employees.
He related that a few months ago they needed to understand why their call volumes were increasing, but not necessarily in line with revenue. So for a short time period they had each of the phone reps keep a tally sheet next to their computer, and on that tally sheet were 8-10 categories of call reason codes – called to place order, called to track order, called to return a product etc. After each call the rep would record the reason for the call on the sheet.
After a few weeks they measured the results. Only 30% of the calls were to place orders, the other 70% of the calls were true customer service calls. On top of that, they were using a third party call center for overflow to take a large percentage of the overall calls because of the increase.
As it was, the third party call center was not able to answer most customer service calls for them, and the problems quickly became:
1. The customer couldn’t get the answer they were looking for immediately.
2. The third party call center was sending emails back and forth to our client trying to get answers.
3. Most of the time our customer then had to make the outbound call to the customer to try and get them their answer and it usually meant more than one call to reach them.
Throughout this whole process the customer didn’t get an immediate answer and the costs for our client went through the roof. In the end they realized that they needed to do things differently. They needed to be more in tune with the customers and give them the tools they needed to answer their questions.
They opted to hire additional customer service reps in the short term to answer the questions immediately as well as provided more information to the customer to reduce the number of calls back and forth. With the elimination of the third party call center they were able to eliminate almost $200,000 annually. The real cost savings is much higher than that by not having to deal with the additional emails and additional customer service calls to the customer.
To some this may seem like a no brainer, but I guarantee you most companies could benefit from taking a step back and looking at things like this. Not just in the call center but the warehouse and other areas. Everyone has some low hanging fruit that could easily save them some money its just a matter of looking for it.
It didn’t take a ton of cash to find these problems; it just took some patience and the realization that audits like this are important. For assistance with thoughts on how to identify this and other low hanging fruit, give us a call and let’s see how we can help your business.
Brian Barry is a Senior Consultant with F. Curtis Barry & Company, a multichannel operations and fulfillment consulting firm with expertise in multichannel systems, warehouse, call center, inventory, and benchmarking; Learn more online at: http://www.fcbco.com.
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