In the previous article I explained the current market trend of moving from contact centre to customer experience. In this article I’ll explain the business case behind the move to customer experience.
It’s highly likely that a business case to transform a current contact centre to customer experience will make financial sense. Why?
The way cloud providers such as Amazon price Amazon Connect makes a transformation highly compelling. It removes the rigidity of annual commits including per agent pricing and Telco lock in and replaces with a flexible consumption-based approach where they seek to make money on new cloud services as opposed to telco minutes.
There are hard business case reductions on the like for like cost in a range of 50% to 25%. Meaning a global CC of 5000 agents could easily cost £5million a year to £2.5million.
Moving to a customer experience platform generates savings in other areas:
- Once you have implemented customer experience further savings will be generated by transferring from voice to chat. A typical Contact Centre has more voice minutes than chat. Assuming a number of 10million voice minutes and 5million chats a year. The per minute cost of a voice minute is far higher than a chat message and shifting the balance from to 10m Chats and 5million voice will generate savings by substituting the technology.
- Automation is crucial in improving the response time for customers but also reduce the number of requests requiring human contact. If currently there are 10 million contacts a year requiring human contact and we can reduce that that a ¼ there is a significant cost saving on agent costs.
- Agents responding to voice can literally only speak to one customer at a time. I’ve yet to see an agent on a conference call with 3 customers trying to resolve their issues. On chat however given the asynchrounous nature of communication it is possible for an agent to have a number of conversations in flight at the same time. This of course is not always the case but is possible and should be factored into agent reform.
One final element of the business case is to review the commitment IT has already made to cloud services such as AWS and Azure. Currently IT deparments are signing 3 year commitment to cloud services which may include increased revenue commitment in years 2 and 3. If this is the case consuming services for Contact centre in Azure or AWS reduces the OPEX requirement overall for IT.
Reform of the IT team servicing contact centre is required. Look to a combination of voice skills and Devops to provide the required innovation and support throughout the life cycle of the