Keeping costs under control in a call centre is vital to it's profitability and longevity. During the current economic climate sales are harder to come by which means profits get squeezed and something has to give. So rather than reducing staff or folding why not try out these emergency tips for big, quick cost reductions. All of these suggestions can be implemented quickly and without significant investment and are guaranteed to strip out operational overhead.

1. Outsourcing IT and comms
Oursourcing IT and comms means less complexity in the local call centre environment. This means that your business does not need expensive IT and comms staff to support the internal systems. The internal communications infrastructure can be replaced with a hosted one and the data systems can be delivered by remote cloud technology. Cost savings are made by avoiding the need for expensive data networking hardware, servers, PBXs, dialers, software application licenses.

2. Convert to voip for outbound calls
SIP trunks are the voip equivalent of ISDN lines. They use broadband bandwidth instead of physical fibre or copper lines which means they are much cheaper. 30 ISDN channels will cost around £500 per month. 30 SIP channels will cost you £150.00 including bandwith. If your predictive dialer, IVR or ACD has SIP trunk capability this is an option for you.

3. Avoid the expensive predictive dialer license/lease renewal costs
Dialer license costs can be ludicrously expensive. You can save thousands by choosing a hosted predictive dialer. If your current dialer support service, licenses or lease are up for renewal it may be worth looking at a hosted dialer solution, it will likely be a lot cheaper. Hosted predictive dialers cost around £275 per dedicated server per month for 15 agents.

4. Buy refurbished handsets or use free softphones
A decent call centre phone with headset is likely to cost you around £200, the equivalent reburbished phone (e.g. Cisco IP phone) with headset is nearer £100. Better still if you use a hosted dialer that supports SIP (session initiation protocol) you can use a free softphone with a USB headset which will probably cost around £25.00

5. Open source CRM, database and Office applications
Why spend thousands of pounds on licensing costs for a CRM database when there are several open source alternatives available. They can be hosted for you for around £30 per month on a good server and can be integrated with your dialer or inbound ACD system easily. Sugar CRM and VTiger are the most popular and best performing CRM / contact management databases.

6. Home based agents
A hosted dialer is essentially a virtual call centre. This means that agents can be geographicaly dispersed without any compromise on productivity. The cost saving here is the office lease, an office is not strictly required at all. Agent productivity reports can be viewed real time from any web browser  

7. Offshoring
A contentious subject but the fact remains that if you are paying your UK staff £7.00 an hour you can partially offshore or completely offshore and pay half this in countries like the Philipines. The Philipines may not suit everyone due to the time difference but there are nearer options like Egypt and South Africa. The trick to success is the IT / comms infrastructure, a hosted dialer service will give you the option of growing economically or backing out without big losses. The main point to consider when offshoring, apart from the cultural and language differences, is the call latency or call delay. The further away the country the higher the latency.

If you manage to combine all of these measures your operational costs will be as low as possible.
Of course we can't help sell more but your business will be more profitable, agile and flexible for staff.

Contact Hostcomm for more information on 0808 168 4400.
www.hostcomm.co.uk