Every business unit plays a vital role in its company’s success. From HR to R&D, all are important.
But just because a business unit is important does not mean it cannot be outsourced or have budgets cut—in 2021, the growing outsourcing market was estimated at $246 billion. And as the world braces for economic uncertainty, departments must find ways to prove they are financially smart.
Contact centers have unique problems, and many become targets because they cannot prove they are more financially efficient than outsourced ones whose job is to prove that they can do a better job — and for less money.
This difficulty proving financial efficiency also affects the IT organization, who make significant technology investments for the contact center. According to the CIO Magazine article “7 Hard Truths of Business IT Alignment”, while IT can report on cost savings for the efficiency to maintain technologies, their inability to prove an ROI for business outcomes is seen as a failure by the C-suite.
But how can contact centers and IT work even better together to prove they’re the best for their business? Can they prove it in a financial language understood and trusted by leadership?
Financial Clarity is the missing piece of the puzzle
To justify their existence, contact center and IT leaders need answers to three financial questions about their contact centers:
- How smart is money working down to any decision, channel, process, and agent?
- How are decisions optimizing financial performance — where, when, and how much?
- How to empower and retain more agents without spending more money?
Called Financial Clarity, these answers empower contact centers to communicate their performance in financial terms understood and trusted by leadership.
And only when equipped with this information can contact centers and IT prove their investments are performing as well as or better than anyone else.
But how do they attain Financial Clarity?
Build a Contact Center and IT Alliance
The good news — the data needed to report Financial Clarity is already in your contact center.
The bad news — it’s stuck in so many places that it’s too costly and complicated to reach.
The latest reports estimate contact centers use an average of 8.6 technology platforms and that doesn’t necessarily include standard backend systems like HR and payroll. So, while the digital transformation has evolved contact center capabilities, it’s created datasets that don’t often connect to each other.
That’s a problem.
To achieve Financial Clarity, contact centers must work closely with their IT partners to extract this critical business data from their technology stack to translate it into a single system of record.
Only when all this data is translated into its exact dollar value are contact center and IT leaders able to analyze and justify their financial efficiency and prove they have optimized contact center technology for the best financial return to the business.
Conclusion: The clock is ticking
To prove they are making the most financially smart decisions, contact centers and IT need Financial Clarity. But Financial Clarity can only be achieved by closely aligning with IT to translate siloed datasets of the contact center’s tech stack into their exact dollar value.
Once contact center leaders can see exactly how much and how smartly money is working down to the agent and process level, they will be able to make better decisions. The long-term benefits from Financial Clarity are far-reaching — agent empowerment, reduced turnover, improved ROI, reduced spending, higher engagement, optimized technology stacks, and better customer experience.
When leveraged effectively, Financial Clarity has proven to generate a 900% ROI on tech stack optimization, reduce turnover by 50%, and increase productivity 40%, all while sustaining average customer satisfaction scores of 92%.
So, contact centers, it’s time to partner with your IT teams more than ever!
Go Beyond Traditional Metrics, And Strengthen Your Contact Center and IT Partnership
Too see the value a stronger partnership with IT can bring, WiserOwl can provide a view of your operation without impacting data privacy issues, in 30 days or less. Don’t waste your next big decision!
