Call Centers Cope with Rising Customer Acquisition and Lead Generation Costs

For many businesses in the lead gen and outbound sales space, it can feel harder and harder to achieve profitability and sustain growth. Between new regulations, flagging contact rates, the increasing cost of leads, and rising competition, there are many factors that threaten to chip away at margins.

In 2025, many of these issues will continue to dog contact center leaders and their teams, but there are also a host of strategies and tools available to help teams unlock operational efficiency, improve performance, and lower customer acquisition costs.

Use this guide to better understand some of the prevailing headwinds contact centers are facing and discover best practices that can help your business rise above the rising costs of lead generation and sales.

This trend article is part of the series, “Contact Center Trends,” helping you stay current with issues, technologies, best practices, and strategies that impact your business. Our aim is to provide tools and guidance that will improve productivity, efficiency, and sustainable profitability for your sales and lead generation team.

What’s behind the rising costs of customer acquisition?

Rising customer acquisition costs for sales call centers can result from various factors, including market conditions, operational inefficiencies, and regulatory challenges. Let’s dig into some of the root causes of rising customer acquisition costs.

Competition is fierce in many industries

Many businesses are navigating highly competitive industries, where leads are closely fought over. Market saturation can cause competition for the same pool of prospects, leading prices to increase. Bidding war competition in advertising channels like Google Ads or Facebook also leads to higher costs for leads and clicks.

Because it’s not just competitors that are standing in the way of successful sales and lower acquisition costs. It’s lower contact rates.

It's harder to contact leads

Response rates have been in decline. Consumers have robocall and telemarketing fatigue and are more reluctant than ever to answer unknown numbers due to scam concerns or perceived disinterest in the caller. Even with omnichannel outreach, email and SMS filters are having reduced effectiveness.

Today’s lead generation and sales teams are facing the perfect storm of reticent consumer behavior and aggressive carrier action, making it as hard as it’s ever been to get leads—even the most interested prospects—on the phone.

Carriers have for the last few years taken substantial measures to stop robocalls, leading many business numbers to be blocked or hit with Spam Likely labels.

When you add in the obstacle of pervasive voicemail use, contact rates have taken quite a hit. Leads and payroll have always been some of the biggest costs for sales call centers, so if your contact rates are low – paid agents not reaching leads – your customer acquisition costs are inevitably rising.

Consent-based leads may be in short(er) supply

As we head into 2025, performance marketers and sales teams might find themselves dealing with fewer leads, thanks to a big shake-up from the FCC. Starting January 27, 2025, businesses will need to get one-to-one consent* from consumers before making telemarketing calls or sending texts. This means no more broad consent forms covering a bunch of “marketing partners” or other sellers—it’s got to be specific and direct.

This change is aimed at closing the “lead generation loophole” but could make life harder for companies relying on shared or co-reg leads to drive sales. To add to the challenge, the FCC now says calls and texts must be tied to the actual website where consent was given. So, lead gen forms will need to be laser-focused on compliance​.

For businesses that don’t adapt, the cost of getting new leads could go through the roof. As teams rethink their strategies, keeping a steady flow of high-quality leads while staying on the right side of the law will take some creative problem-solving—and fast.

*Update: TCPA One-to-One Consent Rule Struck Down January 24, 2025

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down the FCC’s one-to-one consent rule before it could take effect on January 27, 2025. Businesses can continue to collect consent that applies to multiple sellers, as long as that collection process otherwise complies with the TCPA.

Learn more here.

A note on low cost, low intent data:

Inexpensive leads, while plentiful, often have poor data quality (and questionably acquired consent if any]. This can mean dealing with outdated or inaccurate contact information resulting in wasted resources. Purchasing or sharing overused leads from multiple sources can diminish the likelihood of conversion. Cheap becomes expensive.

Sales tech lacks sophistication

Having the right technology and strategic processes in place is critical to managing cost and improving ROI. 

However, a surprising number of companies lack the technology and processes they need to compete effectively or to meet their own revenue goals. 

Get with the technology

Long time call center consultant Heather Griffin says when she begins working with her clients, many of them have what she calls a “frankenstack” (rather than effective “tech stack”) of technology. Their operations are inefficient as they use multiple software solutions – eg, telephony, CRM, marketing tools, and financing – that don’t integrate well.

Griffin recommends that call centers invest in a fully integrated tech stack. 

“A single platform that integrates everything—from lead generation to sales and performance tracking—gives your team the tools to monitor leads, measure success, and streamline workflows. With everything in one place, your team can focus on what matters most: closing deals and growing your business.”

Speed wins and lowers CPA

Teams frequently lack a CRM or dialer that’s able to prioritize speed to lead. Sales teams that reach out to leads after minutes, hours, or even days, instead of just seconds, lose leads to the competition and miss that buyer-ready moment. Sales trainer and consultant Jason Cutter writes:

“I talk to so many salespeople and teams that complain about their Cost Per Acquisition and conversion percentage while, at the same time, they are taking days to call new leads. As soon as possible, make sure to get a dialer platform that does it automatically and instantaneously.”

What’s more, many of these teams fail to have something worthy of being called a sales process in place. Again, Cutter sums up the crux of this issue:

Knowing how to improve your sales process starts with the most basic thing: actually having a sales process. If you’re not tracking, reaching out to, and following up with leads in a way that’s repeatable (and measurable), you’re leaving conversions on the table.

7 tips to lower customer acquisition costs in 2025

Paying mind to your customer acquisition costs is key to maximizing contact center profits. However, the convergence of all the dynamics discussed above means that, in 2025, it will be all the more important for success.

While the exact recipe for driving profits will be unique to each organization, contact centers should look to the following tips and best practices to lower customer acquisition costs—and prevail over this 2025 trend.

1. Start with an accurate measure of your costs

First, you need to be tracking costs in order to effectively lower them. 

Many call centers overlook cost per acquisition (CPA) and instead only look at cost per lead (CPL). However, as Convoso CEO Nima Hakimi says, the CPL-based approach leaves a variety of important costs out of the picture. 

“If I opened a restaurant and set menu prices based on the food costs, but didn’t take into account what I pay the chef, the cooks, the waiters and waitresses…I’d be out of business.”

Be sure that you rely on dialer software that’s able to calculate CPA in real time, giving you insights into not only how much your leads cost but also your agents (payroll) and your technology.

2. Get a clear view of your agents' activity

Driving down CPA depends on efficient use of your agents’ time, so monitor their daily and monthly activity using customizable dashboards.  Identify positive and negative trends, and provide coaching and feedback that makes a difference.

As we cover in another of our trends analyses, sales quality assurance software is becoming essential. Bolstered by advances in conversational AI, QA tools are now able to effectively monitor and analyze calls across entire contact center teams. What’s more, they can even provide ready-made insights to automate part of the coaching process as well.

For organizations looking to accelerate management and coaching, as well as support continual process improvement among your agents, AI-powered QA software is fast becoming a must-have tool.

3. Give your leads to the right agents

Sometimes getting the most out of your call center agents is less a matter of coaching and more about connecting leads with the right agents. For this reason, Jason Cutter says that skills-based routing is one of the best tools for improving cost per acquisition.

“When certain reps are doing well, you want to keep feeding that hot hand,” says Cutter. “You need to make sure you have the technology in place to do that.”

Using Convoso’s advanced lead filtering capability, you can create rules for skills-based routing using any field value you have at your disposal, giving you the ability, for instance, to connect costly high-intent leads only with your top-performing agents—or only route calls from certain states to agents with the correct licensure.

One dialer manager who uses skill routing to protect high-value leads is Amanda Allen of Supreme Health Options:

"I have a lot of the accounts set up on a skill routing type campaign, and that's one of the things that I really, really like. If I have somebody that's training and has no idea what they're doing, I don't want them calling a lead that's $40. So with the skill routing, I put them on cheaper data or older data."

4. Zero in on your contact rates

It may be getting harder to get leads on the phone, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, outbound calling remains one of the most efficient and profitable means of generating leads and closing sales—so long as you have the right tools.

To support healthy contact rates, you must have a comprehensive caller ID reputation management solution. You'll reach leads with more clean caller IDs and drive more successful connections. Convoso’s ClearCallerID™ prevents flagged or blocked numbers with proactive tools and automatic remediation, and streamlines caller ID management to increase call deliverability, and drive more revenue.

5. Report on your speed to lead

Clean caller IDs are essential, but timing is also critical to making contact and converting leads into customers at a lower cost.

Today’s consumers are infamously fickle, moving onto other tasks—or, worse, other products or service providers—just minutes after expressing interest and opting in to be contacted.

In this sales environment, call center automation is absolutely paramount. Without the ability to automatically prioritize and dial leads as soon as they hit the hopper, you’re inevitably going to miss out on sales—and wind up with a higher CPA.

Look for a dialer that prioritizes speed to lead and reaches out to your hottest leads as soon as possible. Better yet, find one that gives you the ability to report on speed to lead in granular detail, so you can continue to find ways to optimize your outreach and lower your acquisition costs.

6. Find more areas to automate

Of course, speed to lead is far from the only aspect of your dialing and lead follow-up processes that can (and should) be automated. Indeed, when it comes to enhancing the efficiency of your call center and optimizing your CPA, there may be no better solution than intelligent automation. 

Like so many other organizations are doing, make 2025 the year that you leverage call center automation tools to push your team toward a brighter future, with cutting-edge technology like:

• Workflow automation: Develop the most effective strategic dialing cadences and incorporate voicemail drops, texts, and emails with workflow automation software that helps you achieve high-efficiency, omnichannel outreach across all of your campaigns.

• Dynamic scripting: Help your agents deliver the right message—or the best possible rebuttal—every time they have a lead on the line with leading call center scripting software that updates in real time, as the conversation unfolds.

• Intelligent virtual agent (IVA) solution: When powered by cutting-edge conversational AI, an IVA like Voso.ai can extend the capabilities of your team at a lower cost. Voso.ai presents a wide variety of use cases with its ability to converse with life-like fluency over both AI SMS and voice: it can field calls and texts as your 24/7 answering service; schedule callbacks and send reminders; and even pre-qualify leads. Use an IVA to eliminate routine, repetitive conversations from agents’ workloads, and allow them to focus on more effectively, and efficiently, generating leads and closing sales at scale.

7. Make the right investment and focus on the return

Understanding and optimizing your operation’s true CPA is important to driving profits. But it’s not everything.

Ultimately, to navigate the pressures and costly dynamics of today’s market, leaders should focus on the return their investments deliver—because oftentimes, you get what you pay for.

As Convoso customer Sean Chapman, Chief Technology Officer at the Medicare lead gen and sales contact center Medigap Life, attests: “The real question [for managers] is ‘What’s the ROI?’ not ‘How much does it cost?’”

After relying on—or trying to—low-cost technology like VICIdial and Chase (now DialedIn) to dial leads, Chapman’s team invested in the Convoso dialer, which offered the features and sophistication they needed to drive improved performance.

Despite the initial increase in cost, they realized better returns virtually overnight—and are driving down total costs in the long run, thanks to 80% increases in contact rates, 60% fewer caller IDs labeled as spam, and 40% fewer leaked voicemails. For Medigap Life, switching dialers was the decision that drove 300% revenue growth.

In 2025, take a page out of their playbook, and consider whether your dialer is putting your organization in a position to win in today’s sales environment.

Because, between rising acquisition costs and competition, falling contact rates and lead supply, it may not seem like it’s getting any easier out there, but the right dialer software can make all the difference.

Take the first step toward scaling your contact center in 2025. Schedule a free demo of our predictive dialer software and see for yourself the difference Convoso delivers.