How Much Does Your Call Center Really Cost? How to do an Easy yet Thorough Cost Assessment

00:00Thank you for for the new, for the, for the, for the, for theif, for the, Welcome back everybody to Exp a via interaction marketing. Expivia is a 500-seat BPO call center outsourcer located in Northwestern Pennsylvania. I'd like to first a apologize to all of our listeners out there who are expecting an episode every Tuesday. I was kind of shocked, to be honest, when I got a couple emails and a couple responses on Facebook asking where the next episode was that actually kind of made me feel good. So again, I apologize for not having this out on Tuesday. is Wednesday, a March 13th as I'm recording this. And the reason, I think, is a pretty good reason. One of the main things that, that keeps me out of trouble outside of Expivia and running the call center here and doing the podcast and doing a lot of different things with the company is I coach high school basketball.

01:55So we are in the middle right now of the state playoff run. I actually have a game today in the PIAA second round. So I apologize again if I'm a little delayed, but I've been kind of swamped the RFPs out to a couple potential clients and preparing for the podcast and the actual running of the center while the team is still watching film and trying to get the team ready as as well for our playoff run. The other thing is to remind me as well, so I'm trying to juggle a lot of. So again, I apologize for having this out late. Okay. So today what we wanted to discuss in this episode is how to do a quick, but yet thorough and I think, really cool cost assessment of your contact center. I don't know. About a year ago I had a couple questions from a couple clients that were trying to kind of evaluate what the real costs were in their call center.

02:56It's one thing for me to kind of talk them through that. It's another thing to really kind of come up with the tool that allows them to do some type of assessment. So that's what we did. So I'm going to plug for this if you'd like to follow along with it. Expivia USA, U.S.A, U.S.A, U.S. U.S.A, U.S.A. top right hand corner there's a little circle there that takes you to the, we have a cost savings, I think it's called the Expivia call center or cost savings calculator. And again, that's if you just want to type in the URL, ExpiviaUSA.com forward slash savings dash calculator. And what we did is we created a really cool kind of fun tool that allows you to put in all the numbers for your call center, things that maybe you're not even thinking about, and then try to quantify I on a per rep basis.

03:50So you might be paying your reps X amount in their payroll, but when you kind of roll everything up, what does,'s that?, Ih has is your agents. So here what we're doing is we're going to look at, we're going to say an agent, on average about 35 hours a week. We're going to say that you could put any number you want in here that is for your call center but let's just say you know the seven fifteen sixteen seventeen dollars let's use seventeen dollars an hour here for for fifty weeks because we're gonna give our reps two weeks off for vacay and they actually rep cost before before taxes is is twenty nine thousand seven hundred and fifty now the next kind of, of human expense that you're gonna pay for that you're paying and hopefully you are is your supervisor cost. So what we are assuming here and I think that you know that really the average for most call centers is a 15 to 61 supervisor to associate ratio.

05:50[pricing remark omitted] So again, we're taking this over 50 weeks Add that on to the rep salary which is an additional cost of about $ All right, and then you know, I think most call centers now and if you're not, you probably should think about it or giving you a vacation and sick time. So. From our vacation hours which are, you know, two, We're assuming that you're paying holiday hours into this. [pricing remark omitted]

07:45[pricing remark omitted] We then have equipment, your computer, your headset, the desk. [pricing remark omitted] And thenadobe talk about our quality assurance. What we like to do is is we like to have a ratio of about double what the supervisor is. So our ratio for our QA is right around 30 to 1. [pricing remark omitted]

09:46[pricing remark omitted] That's not just your minute charges, but that's your telephony usage as well. Okay, so then, you know, some of the other costs that are involved here are training costs. [pricing remark omitted] You know, you got to take your rent and kind of look at the space that you're in. [pricing remark omitted] The average associate takes up about 150 square feet of space, and again, these are all variables. So, the cost to rent that area, for that, it's right around 3,000.

10:51[pricing remark omitted] So, you know, that might be a little bit high. You know, depending on your call center, but, you know, we can, it's like 500. Definitely a salary for maybe two IT guys at the 70 AD grant. When we add all of this up, so I know that's a lot, and it's a lot to just kind of talk through on a podcast, but we have our aging costs, we have our supervisor costs, we have payroll taxes, vacation and sick time, telephony and permanent costs, your equipment to actually get the call center going. QA, workforce management, CRM licensing, like Salesforce or Zendesk. have training costs, you have your rent, you have your motivation, you RIT costs, right? There's a lot that goes into this that a lot of people really don't think about.

12:10[pricing remark omitted] Does that kind of surprise people hereafterirable. I think it kind of surprised me when I first did this.. I know we've done a lot of forecasting. We normally do our financial outlooks based on space and based on different factors. But this is about what we see when we do consulting for our clients as well. [pricing remark omitted] And now if you're going to go down to minimum wage or you're going to do really low cost stuff, obviously that's going to be a little bit lower.

13:24But I think to really run a high end customer service, contact center, that's about where you need to be. Now, listen, I am not here to plug outsourcing. But this kind of blows my mind too and I think it kind of brings things into perspective when you talk about outsourcing. So when you hear things people stop right there. They don't realize all of these ancillary costs that get involved that. While for us, and again, I'm not plugging speed via not plugging way too expensive that's crazy but here's the other thing you know what your riser costs are zero payroll taxes zero vacation and sick time not paying any of that telephony permitted costs zero equipment zero QA taking care for excuse me taking care of workforce management you don't pay anything for that CRM licensing it's all covered you might pay some training costs and it's just initial training so that's another four hundred eighty dollars and here's the other other cool thing, if you lose somebody or if somebody leaves the- That's the cost ability to train it and fill it so you don't pay anything after initial.

15:04You don't pay anything for rent for the lease motivations. Normally you don't you might want to cough a little bit up for that. So the total agent cost per year using high end USA call center at twenty five twenty six dollars an hour is in the low is in the low to mid 40 Well, internally, most of the time, it's high 50s to 60,000. [pricing remark omitted] If you're doing this right and you don't have any of the responsibility, you don't have any, you know, taxes that you'd have to pay from a workbench comp a workman's comp or for really looking at any of those types of issues that's all taken care of. Think about that kind of stuff, right? I just want to open people's minds. Again, I am an outsourcer. I'm not going to shy away from that. We are doing this podcast to kind of at least, you know, bring a little bit of light to see the things that we do. But for the most part, I really just want to help you try to really visualize and see all the things that go into your call center. What are some of the things that you could cut? What are the things that if you are not as efficient as you possibly can be, what are the things that you need to look at from a from an ROI standpoint? So take, take a look at the calculator. I think it's pretty beneficial to seeing, you know, how you can operate, what some of the costs are. And also, you. Know, why you might not be either making as much money or spending more money than you think in your call center. A lot of the time, people just blow their budget out because all they look at is the per rep maybe you know the cost of the telephony. But you don't really add in all of this I hope that that's helpful again. Go to our website and calculator, or it's just ExpiviaUSA.com forward slash savings dash calculator.

17:19And I think that you'll get a really good idea of some of the costs again that are involved with with running your call center and hopefully that can make you-you a little bit more efficient. I know this one's a little short. I do have a got a bus to catch here in an hour I got a couple of things to do before that way with the review on iTunes. So if some of you guys can do that as well that would really help us kind of get the word out. Allow us to kind of continue this kind of this evangelistic method of getting call center a operations out to the masses. Thank you very much and I'll talk to you guys next week and I promise it'll be on Tuesday. Bye. Oh hey, one more thing. I'd love to hear anybody's opinion on the sound quality. If you could maybe shoot me an email, tweet.

18:59This has been advice from a call center geek. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to the show so you're the first to hear next week's episode jam packed, packed with actionable take Also, take a look at our contact center operations book by the same name, Advice from a Call Center Geek on Amazon. This podcast is sponsored by ExpiviaUSA.com.