In my previous articles, we started looking at building the business case to help sell your CX innovation and evolution to a Progressive Contact Center. Before we move any further, I want to highlight the definition from the Aberdeen report that I quite liked and thought it accurately described a forward looking CX experience Contact Center.
As stated in the report, a Progressive Contact Center is a group of contact centers that have lead the way in delivering flawless digital experiences.
It is one that delivers consistent and personalized interactions across all digital channels while also reporting improvements (decrease) in customer effort.
In Part 2 of this series, we ended up with the concept of determining or having a decent understanding of the costs that your Contact Center generates.
Now for the more difficult part, what value or more importantly the revenue that your Contact Center generates.
If you are lucky to work in a Contact Center that takes orders or sells to the end customers, then the notion of understanding the revenue you Contact Center contributes is simple: You can speak with a VP of Sales, CRO (Chief Revenue Office) or CFO to share those numbers.
If you are lucky to work in (notice I did not say unlucky?) a Contact Center that deals primarily in customer support or customer experience interactions, capturing these numbers are not immediately clear.
In this type of Contact Center interaction, you will need to focus on your Contact Center metrics as well as any CX scoring your customers are providing (e.g. NPS or CSAT).
In another selfless plug, this is where a Customer Experience Solutions Provider like LANtelligence can come in and assist your team to help build the business case for your CX innovation and enhancements.
In your non-revenue generating Contact Center your focus is primarily on customer retention, or at least is should be. The question that is asked next, how is keeping customers from leaving helping with my case in how our Contact Center generates revenue?
In the sales and revenue domain, the cost of finding and securing a new customer is like 10-20x the expense of keeping an existing customer.
It should be clear that the revenue that your Contact Center is generating is the ongoing value of the customer to your organization.
We need to look at a couple of metrics to help with our case. The first is the Average Customer Lifespan, which is how long on average your customer does business with your company.
Average Customer Revenue
The next step is the Average Customer Revenue a customer of your company contributes to your organization’s revenue.
So, time for some mathematics:
Assumptions
Average Customer Lifespan = 5 Years
Average Customer Revenue = $1200 / year or $100/month
These are basic and simple numbers just for the purpose of this example. If you take these two numbers, the Average Lifetime Value of this customer is 5 years x $1200/year = $6000 for lifetime of the customer to your organization.
Conservatively, if you use the 10X factor for replacing a departing customer with retaining and existing one, that is 10 x $6000 or $60 000 cost to replace that existing customer. Your Contact Center plays a huge role in retaining customers and retaining ongoing Customer Lifetime Value for the organization.
In the next part, we will look at the positioning of this newly acquire knowledge about your Contact Center to your Executive team.
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