The contact centre world is evolving fast, particularly when it comes to the shift to an opex model and a more global approach to provisioning.
Pre-pandemic, we’d already seen organisations adopting pay-as-you-use platforms, but the past year of market uncertainty has accelerated take up, as organisations look for ways to deliver an effective service while holding down costs. Offering flexibility and scalability, contact centre as a service (CCaaS) solutions are set to dominate: according to Gartner, by 2024, CCaaS solutions will represent around 70% of all deployments, up from 20% in 2019.
So how can your organisation make the most of this trend, cost effectively? Here are three essential steps to optimising cost in your contact centre.
1. Accept that your organisation has to adapt to fit the platform
Moving to pay-as-you-use platforms involves a change in approach. Taking a capex route to contact centre development, you specified exactly what you wanted, and bespoke software was crafted to exactly match your objectives. The platform was perfectly adapted to your organisation. But pay-as-you-use platforms are typically standardised, which means the organisation has to adapt to the platform – not the other way round.
Although you have to put in time and effort to standardise your ways of working to fit the platform – a significant challenge for a global operator – the payoffs are huge. Your contact centre will be far easier to upgrade, and you can take advantage of new technologies faster. Plus, it’s set up to take advantage of every opportunity to optimise costs.
2. Take a global perspective
The pandemic has underlined how important it is to build geographic resilience into your contact centre platform. Many organisations have needed to switch business from country to country to cope, and even more have had to divert operations to agents working from home globally.
Plus, as we emerge from the pandemic, we need to be ready for unpredictable business usage patterns across the globe as countries open up at different times (and may have to temporarily shut down again). For example, an airline operating in a country that has vaccinated vulnerable people and is allowing international travel is likely to see a big surge in contact centre activity as customers book flights. The airline will need the flexibility to increase contact centre capability in that country, and perhaps to reduce capability in other countries.
By adopting a global concurrency model, you can dramatically reduce your costs. Many organisations don’t realise that the pay-as-you-use model means you only pay when an agent is logged in. So, although an organisation may have 3,000 agents around the world, perhaps only 700 will be logged in at any one time, so the business only ever pays for 700 agents.
With concurrency and a pay-as-you-use model you’ll only pay on average for about 30% of your agents.
3. Focus on reporting and data administration systems
The economics of a concurrent pay-as-you-use model are too good to pass up. The challenge, however, is local autonomy. If your entire global organisation is now paying for 700 seats, how do you divide that cost back out to each of your markets?
This puts the emphasis on reporting and data handling. Five years ago, the number one contact centre performance indicator was the ability to complete a good quality call. Now, it’s equally important to have accurate and always-on reporting and data available globally, and we’re finding databases are a critical part of service level agreements. Security also has to be a part of this mix, so your data handling meets local regulations wherever you’re operating.
Start your contact centre transformation
At BT, we have the global infrastructure to transform your contact centre. We combine a resilient network, a global voice offering, an ecosystem of leading software vendors, the latest cybersecurity defences, and a deep understanding of international regulatory environments to support your global concurrency contact centre model.
We have a choice of offerings that get you set up in the cloud in just a few weeks. Why not chat through your options with our team and explore a contact centre approach that flexes to the changing needs of your organisation.