Call Center ROI Calculator: One Key Metric to Understand Performance

In the modern call center, every second counts. Each action—and interaction—unfolding across the entire organization adds up to profit, loss, and the potential for growth.

To spur the right kind of change at your business and unlock scalability, it’s crucial to understand the impact of key investments. That’s where ROI comes in.

Use this quick guide to ROI to understand the importance of the KPI for all businesses. Our call center ROI calculator will help you better understand the performance of your business—and how the right investments can improve it.

Return on investment, or ROI, is an absolutely essential call center metric for measuring success. At its core, it’s a measure of efficiency and effectiveness.

That is, it puts a number value on how efficient your call center’s performance is—and how effective any investments in talent, technology, and beyond have been. In particular, call center ROI can provide an excellent assessment of the value delivered by your call center software investment.

When it comes down to it, the formula for call center ROI is simple:

Of course, as elegant as this formula is, determining the value of your investments can be a bit tricky. Executing it and understanding its real-world impact requires consideration of several aspects of your business, including not just key costs and investments but their effects on key performance metrics.

When determining the total value of all of your investments, you must first consider your call center’s biggest costs: your labor, your software, and your leads. There’s also its operational costs—rent, security, electricity, etc—and the cost of compliance. (The cost of supporting TCPA compliance these days encompasses a range of investments, including technology solutions, expert counsel, and more.)

The areas of your call centers where you target investments aren’t static, they’re dynamic. And understanding the nature and magnitude of change caused by call center investment is essential to make the right decisions to boost ROI. That’s why it’s important to zero in on key performance metrics when calculating call center ROI.

For outbound call centers, that means understanding how expenditures affect leading indicators like contact rates and conversions. Because, for instance, if a small increase in spending leads to a significant increase in contact rates, your agents will have more opportunities to convert leads and drive revenue. Use our call center ROI calculator to see just how much moving the needle on KPIs like contact rate can help bolster your bottom line.

So, you know how to calculate your ROI. Your next biggest question, then, is probably an obvious one: How do I improve my call center ROI?

Making investments in higher quality and quantities of data, as well as in your organization's workforce, can power improved returns. But it’s adding some of today’s technologies that has the greatest potential to boost your call center ROI. Explore these top solutions that can elevate contact rates, conversions, and call center efficiency to new heights and, in turn, drive ROI to scalable levels.

Powerful Dialing and Speed to Lead

The defining feature of any outbound call center software, your dialer’s abilities can make or break your ROI. The right software for outbound teams should feature the flexibility of multiple dial modes to meet the needs of individual campaigns, as well as the power to reliably dial through lists.

For those in outbound sales, speed to lead—the ability to reach costly leads as fast as possible—is crucial to success. Without a dialer able to quickly scale up and prioritize the warmest leads while still penetrating aged prospects in your CRM, your call center is leaving ROI—and growth—on the table.

Why? Because at the end of the day it’s all about opportunity. Dialer power and strategic speed to lead deliver greater contact rates and give your team more opportunities to win and increase ROI.

Caller ID Reputation Management

The era of STIR/SHAKEN has brought rampant call blocking and flagging issues, making it harder than ever before to reach leads who have raised their hands to be contacted. Comprehensive caller ID reputation management tools can help businesses fight back, lower their contact rates, and give their agents more opportunities to make sales—and drive greater ROI.

Robust Reporting and Analytics

We’re fans of the old maxim “you can’t improve what you can’t measure,” a statement that couldn’t be truer when it comes to ROI. Top-of-the-line call center reporting tools should automate your ability to understand the performance of your call center in real time and over the long term.

Plus, they should deliver their own ROI calculations: “The best-in-class contact centers focus on their cost per acquisition at a lead vendor level,” says Convoso’s CEO Nima Hakimi. And the best-in-class call center software options simplify teams’ ability to do just that.

Accurate Voicemail Detection

When payroll is the biggest expense, you want call center agents to make the most of every second possible. Delivering their best sales pitch to a voicemail message instead of a live prospect? Not exactly the most productive use of their time.

Answering machine detection that’s highly accurate eliminates these wasted seconds that add up in a hurry and, in tandem with a powerful predictive dialer, puts valuable talk time back in the hands of your agents. The result? Greater ROI.

You won’t find one of these ROI-oriented solutions just anywhere, let alone all of them. That’s why the key to driving greater call center ROI is opting for the right unified solution that can deliver a range of new capacities and unlock a similar variety of new efficiencies.

Ultimately, you should look for a dialer based on value instead of price. As you can see—right in the ROI formula itself—a lower initial price might seem to offer an advantageously lower upfront investment. But if it fails to deliver real revenue growth, what you save upfront is hardly worth it.

“You’ve got to ask yourself how much you are spending on your leads and how much you are paying your agents to understand what’s really happening and how much it’s going to cost you by going with a more affordable solution,” says Nima Hakimi. “You’ve got to understand that if your dialer is not efficient at making every single call go through, you’re simply wasting leads and you’re wasting your agent’s time.”

What is your call center’s ROI? Is your contact center software delivering?

Schedule a demo today and we can walk you through the strong ROI most companies realize with Convoso's solution.