Posts Tagged ‘Investment’

Call Center – When Should You Implement Outsourcing to Maximize Return on Investment?

In the initial phases of a start up, a company may possess the requisite manpower to take care of the sporadic customer calls. The in-house employees may themselves be well acquainted with various facets of the business to be able to offer timely and satisfactory customer support, obliterating the need of investing in outsourced call center services or training fresh employees for the purpose. If you are lucky, this will not last for long.

If at a later stage the business picks up momentum and sales suddenly shoot up like never before, it might just get impossible to adequately handle calls from the customers and clients using the in-house resources. Things might get out of hand and the well-paid executives of the company might have to attend to customer calls at the cost of neglecting crucial work-a-day business tasks. Nothing can be more suicidal for a business establishment. This is where the need of an appropriate and resourceful call center arises.

Any kind of product service support, IT support or telemarketing support that is removed from the primary profit-making business operations of the company can be outsourced to a call center dealing in these services. It might not be a good idea to install and operate an in-house call center for these tasks as each set up would mean multiple expenses on telephone lines, computers and the all-expensive call tracking software, not to speak of the cost of maintaining the entire establishment in the long run.

Statistics in favor of call centers

In the last couple of decades call centers have slowly and steadily gained the favor of businesses and establishments across the globe. Companies can now bet on call centers to give them the much-needed growth push while relieving them of numerous peripheral obligations to focus on the core business operations. Statistics show that the attitude of businesses towards call centers is undergoing a very positive shift, in that, expenditure on call centers is set to spiral up to $400 billion by the end of 2011 with 30 percent of the amount dedicated to outsourced call centers.

Maximizing returns on investment from call center

The right measure of success for any call center operation is its return on investment (ROI). The benefits accrued out of improved sales and customer retention should far exceed the costs incurred in outsourcing the call center services.

In fact, the attempt here should be to ensure that the returns are maintained at a high level and the company makes most out of the investment undertaken in hiring the services. Businesses can apply three basic processes to ascertain this:

* Analyze Data: Proper monitoring of the call data is indispensable. After studying the data collected on areas, such as, the call duration, the number of resolved issues, the number of unresolved issues, the number of times a caller is transferred, and so on, adequate and timely changes can be brought about to make the process all the more effective.

* Set Goals: By generating achievable objectives in the various facets of call management one can chalk out result-oriented guidelines to carry out the functions in the best possible manner. The CRM data can be very useful in the process.

* Train and motivate personnel: It is very important to keep the call center personnel adequately motivated to discharge their responsibilities well and to keep honing their skills by attending various training programs.

Outsourcing call center services can be profitably resorted to as and when needed by business establishments, whether it is to handle a seasonal surge in business activity or to deal with constant rise and fall in customer service requirement.

Measuring ROI On A Call Center Investment

Traditional ROI calculations use the level of profit generated by an asset divided by the value of the asset and expressed as a percentage. That’s fine but when we seek to ascribe a value to non-profit generating assets we need to look at ways in which we can quantify the value that the call center is contributing to overall business operations.

Call center data management and manipulation has lent itself particularly well to KPI metric and Balanced Scorecard methodology. KPI/Balanced Scorecard techniques are a mainstay of the management of any call center and using the metrics that are being produced from these management information tools allows to start calculating an approximation for ROI.

If we move away from the idea of profit centers that need to be maximized and cost centers that need to be cut so logically increasing profit, we can start thinking of the different business components as contributing value.

What is the value that we can ascribe to a call center it doesn’t create anything?

First, lets look at a revised ROI calculation, we can pretty easily work out a cost for the call center which is going to be used in the ROI calculation if we use that as asset value of the ROI number crunching.

Second, if we look at the relative contribution of call center activities we can start ascribing a value based on the effect on our financial and management accounting information. Linking information from customer service feedback and focus groups will allow us to develop an idea of the impact on repeat business for instance. Repeat business is something that our accounting and CRM system will be monitoring so we can get a value for that. The customer survey and feedback groups will also give an indication as to how important our customer service is in winning repeat business orders and that will in turn allow us to infer a value for that proportion of repeat business that is attributable to the call center efforts.

We are now close to being able to perform an ROI calculation in that we have determined a value that is created for the expense of our customer service efforts made by the call center.

Using such attributable value calculations for ROI is not flawless but it does provide a valuable tool for tracking the value of a non-revenue division that is being contributed to overall business success. Tracking ROI of this nature over time, as long as the calculation is made on a consistent basis will help indicate and highlight the relative success of initiatives and investment in the call center.

Calculating an overall ROI can be done by a broader attribution of value that is created by the call center and the total expense that is incurred by it. Used alone such an ROI calculation is not going to be of much help but the use of the incremental ROI that can be calculated for discrete costs and further investment in the call center is very useful for helping to justify whether incremental investment should be made or not.

Florida Regional Center Selects Exclusive Visas To Attract EB-5 Foreign Investment Capital

Florida Regional Center Selects Exclusive Visas To Attract EB-5 Foreign Investment Capital
Florida Regional Center, based in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., has selected Exclusive Visas, one of the premier EB-5 consulting firms in the U.S., to assist in the formation of the newly-formed regional center, and to market its future projects to foreign investors. As part of its duties, Exclusive Visas will introduce Florida Regional Center to its international network of referral agents and …

Read more on PRWeb via Yahoo! News

GreenWizard Raises $1.15 Million in Series A Investment

GreenWizard Raises $1.15 Million in Series A Investment
CHARLESTON, S.C.—-GreenWizard, Inc. – a web-based expert system that allows architects, engineers, and contractors to cross-search, compare, and document products for LEED and green commercial construction – today announced that it has closed a Series A round of private investment from a syndicate of venture capital funds and angel investors.

Read more on Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance

Contact Center Benchmarking Research Reveals Top Investment Initiatives

Contact Center Benchmarking Study Finds Organizations Preparing for Economic Recovery by Implementing Automated Interaction Recording, Quality Monitoring and Analytics Technologies to Streamline Operations.

VPI (Voice Print International, VPI-corp), the premier global provider of interaction recording and analytics, contact center quality management, and workforce optimization solutions, announced the availability of the findings from the 2009 Agent Performance Management (APM) contact center benchmarking research. Conducted by leading research firm Ventana Research and sponsored by VPI, this contact center benchmarking study is the first quantitative research to assess the maturity and direction of the emerging discipline for managing contact center agents and the extended workforce responsible for handling a business’s customer interactions. Backed by extensive feedback from 365 contact centers, the contact center benchmarking report offers significant insights into how companies are improving performance by focusing on their contact center agents, who largely shape the customer experience. The contact center benchmarking research findings include analyses of processes deployed and technologies used to make the agent workforce more effective. Contact center benchmarks also include the information and metrics used to monitor and assess agent performance.

“Companies interact with customers many thousands of times a day, in many forms including a large number of calls to contact centers,” Said Richard Snow, vice president and research director at Ventana Research who led the research and heads the company’s Customer and Contact Center Performance Management research practice. “In today’s economic environment it is important that agents handle each of these calls in a way that leaves the customer feeling he or she has had a good experience, as well as producing a beneficial business outcome. But this research shows that too many organizations are striving after cost efficiencies rather than ensuring agents deliver an effective experience that will enhance customer satisfaction.”

Patrick Botz, corporate vice president of marketing at VPI stated that VPI was deeply gratified to partner with Ventana Research to launch the innovative contact center benchmarking research on contact center agent performance management. “The results of this contact center benchmarking research demonstrate that, in order to survive the current economic downturn and prepare for the imminent upswing, today’s forward-thinking companies are positioning themselves for rapid improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency by planning investments in more intelligent, automated interaction recording and contact center workforce optimization software tools.”  

Key recommendations include:

• Improve customer interaction-handling by thinking more strategically. Focus on automating the agent quality monitoring process, using analytics tools to improve the agent assessment process, and utilizing more outcome-focused key performance metrics.

• Make better use of available technology and applications. Follow the example of innovative companies and deploy unified communications, smarter call routing to best-skilled and highest-performing agents, call audio and desktop screen recording and analytics, agent coaching, and the latest contact center-specific performance management tools.

• Reassess key performance metrics. Explore supplementing basic measures such as number of calls handled, average length of calls and percent of calls placed on hold with more outcome- and business-related measures.

For a free copy of the summary of the contact center benchmarking report findings and recommendations for improvement, visit VPI-corp.

About the Research Methodology:

A total of 365 responses are included in the formal contact center benchmarking research results conducted in 2009 and had representation from across the world. Respondents represent a varied sampling of contact center sizes and industries including Service Providers, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Telecommunications and Government.  

For more information, visit VPI-corp.