10 Ways to Turn Your Contact Center Into a Profit Engine!
I remember having my first conversation with a Contact Center leader about 20 years ago. He mentioned that his organization looked at the customer service function as a necessary evil rather than a contributor to growth.
Budgets for the customer service function are always trimmed, staff are stretched, and technology upgrades are often seen as “nice to have.”
From where we were 20 years ago to now, things have changed considerably. People have started looking at the customer experience function positively and have begun looking at it as one of the major differentiators.
Customer experience has become the product in most situations.
However, even today, half the organizations still pigeonhole the contact centers as cost centers.
A study by Deloitte states thus:
Organizations that view customer service as a strategic function are 60% more profitable than those that see it as a cost center.
It has never been easier to make the shift from the mindset of being a cost center to a profit center. What with the availability of AI, cloud, and analytics?
Let us look at 10 ways by which you can turn your contact center into a revenue generator.
1. Upsell and Cross-Sell
What is easier, selling or upselling and cross-selling?
With selling, you are talking to someone who is figuring out if they want to engage with you, your credibility, and whether he is making the right decision.
Meanwhile, with upselling and cross-selling, you are talking to a customer who is engaged and interested. How difficult would it be to sell something additional to this segment that would make their lives easier?
The second situation is far easier, and this is where the contact centers operate. You would always see opportunities to personalize offers for existing customers and provide relevant upgrades and add-ons.
As a contact center, you are at a point where you can make your customer’s lives easier and generate substantial revenues in the process.
According to McKinsey, organizations that use data-driven personalization in contact centers see up to 20% increase in sales conversions.
2. Leverage AI to Identify Opportunities
I bought a laptop from an online marketplace five years ago. Along with it, I also bought an external mouse and a keyboard protector. Recently, I made another purchase of a laptop, but this time, I didn’t choose the external mouse and the keyboard protector.
What did the marketplace do?
It suggested that I should probably buy these two items along with my laptop. I didn’t take the bait. However, I received a series of emails from them suggesting I may be interested in them, and they threw a nice discount along with the suggestion.
I ended up buying the keyboard protector. Their intelligence engine was able to pull out the fact that I had purchased these add-ons the previous time I bought a laptop, and it was able to personalize the recommendation for me.
3. Prioritize High-Value Customers
I have had an account with a bank for the past twenty years, and I have relationships with them at multiple levels. They treat me as one of the privileged customers because of my long-standing relationship with them and the nature of our transactions.
When I call the bank for any reason, it recognizes my number and directs me to an agent immediately. I don’t have to go through the IVR system menu at all in this case.
I find this to be a major convenience, which encourages me to engage with them for all my banking needs.
This segregation allows the contact center to land calls from privileged customers to expert agents, making them focus their energies where it matters most.
4. Improve First-Call Resolution
How often have you had to call the customer support function to resolve simple queries of yours?
You’re happy if they get resolved in your first interaction, and when you have to interact multiple times to get your issues resolved, you start to look for alternatives.
Often, the contact center agents don’t get to know why a customer is calling. The context is completely missing. However, when you have omnichannel capabilities, you will have all your channels integrated besides integrations with the internal systems.
This would allow you to access all customer interactions and understand the context, which ensures better resolutions in the first interaction itself.
A study by the SQM group suggests that increasing FCR by just 1% improves customer satisfaction by 1.4% and reduces operational costs by 1%.
5. Focus On Resolutions Over AHT
Retention of customers is more important than acquiring customers. It is an unwritten rule for every business. The cost of acquiring a new customer is multiple times more expensive than retaining one.
How do you go about retaining your customers?
By delighting them, and the starting point of delighting them is resolving their challenges and problems quickly.
Instead of focusing on the Average Handling Time (AHT) of calls, you should focus on resolving their challenges and problems. This would build the trust and ensure that revenues increase over time.
Have you heard of Zappos?
They are one of the customer experience leaders, and they are a living example of an organization that is focused on resolving issues rather than focusing on the AHT.
Zappos empowers its agents to resolve issues, and this has resulted in a 2.5x higher average customer lifetime value than the industry average.
6. Turn Feedback Into Revenue
Every customer conversation is an opportunity to grow. Every customer complaint is a gift. Every request from a customer is an input to the product and services team.
This allows you to improve your products and services and maximize your revenue potential.
Let me give you an example.
A certification service provider was offering onsite consulting to all its customers in the payments domain. During the COVID pandemic, they were not able to travel onsite to provide consulting, and they were stuck.
During this time, one of the customers checked if they could provide remote consulting. When this provider thought about it, they felt they could make remote consulting work with a little bit of help from the customer’s side. They prepared a remote consulting process, documented it, and trained the customer on what was expected.
This became a huge success, and since then, they started offering remote consulting. Today, this model has fetched enormous revenues and repeat customers.
7. Leveraging Proactive Outreach
I received a text from one of my credit card issuers. The message was simple.
You will not be able to use your credit card on 10th April 2025 between 02.00 and 02.45 am due to some upgrade activity on our servers.
We are talking about 45 minutes in a year that it would not work. Why is there a need for the issuer to keep us informed?
When you know that it is a scheduled maintenance, you should always inform your customers. It doesn’t matter, even if it affects only 0.000001% of your customers.
Likewise, you can send proactive nudges to your customers on insurance renewals, credit card expiry, expiring trials, usage limits, and new feature alerts.
This would help you retain customers and make them buy your offerings repeatedly.
8. Monetize Self-Service
When was the last time you went to an insurance company to pay your renewal premiums?
When was the last time you went to the office of a utility company to pay your bills?
I don’t even go to the corporation office to pay my property tax. I get a payment link from my corporation office with all my details pre-filled. I verify the details, click on the payment link, and pay through any of the UPI applications I have.
What do all these self-service channels do?
They make my life easier. Besides, it improves their revenue and reduces the cost of deploying resources to service these requests.
9. Use Call Abandonment Rates to Improve Sales
Why do people abandon calls?
The reasons are many, and some of the common ones include:
- Long wait times
- Poor routing, whether the customers get transferred from one extension to another and they have to repeat themselves with every agent
- Tacky IVR menu, where you get stuck in the loop
Understand the reasons for the call abandonment, and even conduct continuous surveys with your customers to understand the friction points.
Fix the cause, and start re-engaging those leads.
Even a 1% decrease in call abandonment rate can result in a 3 to 5% boost in conversion rates. So, ensure that you don’t leave money on the table.
10. Harness Real-Time Analytics
Are you one of those organizations that wait for month-end reports or weekly reports to drive decisions?
Stop doing that right away. Most contact center platforms today can provide real-time reporting that would allow you to make decisions for the customers.
You can have a real-time view of agent performance, call volume spikes, customer sentiment, which products get the most questions, and more.
This would allow you to prioritize and align your marketing and sales messaging accordingly to ensure that customers derive the most benefits while your revenues increase consistently.
What should be the mindset of organizations when it comes to contact centers?
Contact centers are not just the place where problems are fixed. It is where loyalty is earned, insights are discovered, upsells are made, churn is reduced, and brands are humanized.
You don’t have to look at your contact center as a line item on your expense sheet anymore. When you have the right technology, empowered agents, and mindset shift, your contact center can go on to become the most significant revenue generator of your business.
So, the next time someone calls it a cost center, equip them on the ways to convert it into the most significant sales engine.