There are many facets to any successful call center, either in-house or outsourced. All of these elements must be taken into account for a COO or Head of Customer Experience to measure and understand the return on investment of their customer support center.

When measuring the investment of taking a firm’s call center in-house (insourcing), of course you will include direct employee costs, such as salary, but you should also be including other overheads, such as rental costs, utilities, employee benefits, recruiting expenses, and the like.

Generally speaking, these necessary expenses are closely related, and they tend to be about 40% to 50% of a firm’s direct employee costs.

When measuring the investment of an outsourced call center, you also need to consider the benefits that are provided by a partner who specializes in customer care:

Improved average handling times for your contacts
Higher sales conversion rates
First-touch resolution, no multiple contacts
Existing highly trained staff
Expenses related to attrition rate
Existing enterprise-level technology and infrastructure
Higher customer satisfaction,

All of these benefits created by leveraging a specialized customer care services provider helps to reduce a firm’s overhead and operational costs.

There are also other major ROI benefits to an outsourced customer care center for firms in an array of industries, from Retail & E-Commerce, to Healthcare, to Financial Services, to Wireless & Telecommunications.

For firms with extreme seasonality, like retailers as they approach the holiday shopping season, an outsourced call center becomes extremely attractive solution because of its rapid scalability. The customer care vendor ensures that the support systems, processes, staff, and operations can scale up to extreme demand levels, unburdening the retailer with this huge expense.

Firms that have extraordinary regulations, such as financial services and health care, can be exposed to risk and unforeseen expenses as industry regulations shift. Having a long-term partner for customer support enables the firm to focus on helping their patients and customers, while relying on a trusted partner for transactional patient and customer support with full regulatory compliance.

And those industries with highly relationship-driven customer care needs, like wireless and telecommunications, where firms maintain customers for decades, require technical support services that go above and beyond the norm. These customer care partners also can associate and identify with the customer, while assuming the skin, voice, and tone of the brand during all customer interactions. This level of brand training can be incredibly expensive for high-turnover internal customer care departments, which makes a top-tier outsourced call center partner an efficient and invaluable asset.

Are you assessing the ROI of your call center and customer care solution? Our experts can provide key metrics and help you assign a dollar value to the outsourcing process. Contact us today for a free consultation.