One of the biggest concerns when examining a new call center solution is if it’s worth the investment. What’s the ROI when making a switch? Should your business move forward? How long will it take to recoup the investment?

ROI brings rationality to financial decisions; it provides directional data to help organizations evaluate solutions. It also helps determine the efficiency of an existing investment. And measuring ROI isn’t as difficult as you might think.

To determine ROI for your contact center solution, you’ll need to consider key costs as well as the value it creates.

Identify Key Investment Costs

  • Subscription/license costs – What is the subscription or license cost for the software? How many seats will you require each year? Do you need to account for additional seasonal seats?
  • IT labor and support costs – Does your solution require IT staffing to ensure uptime and maintenance of hosted services? Does that team also configure complicated IVR menus and workflows? How much time—and therefore cost—can you allot to software user support, onboarding and permissions? Does the team build custom reporting or perform custom integrations and development?
  • Implementation costs– What’s the implementation timeline? Do you need to add hardware to your existing infrastructure? Did deployment require professional services at an additional expense?

Determine Where Value Was Created

To measure the value your investment creates, think in terms of business benefits. This will vary among organizations depending on business objectives and data collection. Here is a list of common benefit categories.

  • Cost reduction – Does the solution enable you to forecast monthly costs or avoid hidden costs like maintenance and system upgrades? Can you easily accommodate seasonal flux in agent seats or do you pay upfront for peak volume? Were IT labor and support efforts affected, such as spending less time on maintenance, administrative tasks or help tickets?
  • Improved productivity – Is agent handle time reduced? Are supervisors better equipped to monitor performance and provide proactive coaching? Can teams collaborate for faster, more efficient results?
  • Employee retention ­­– How has employee satisfaction changed? Is the solution easy to use? Does it consolidate the number of systems employees engage with?
  • Increased income – Does the solution enable additional income in relation to sales or marketing campaigns? Does it affect customer satisfaction scores?
  • Reduced downtime – Has the frequency and duration of unplanned outages changed?

Calculating ROI

If you’re currently using the Genesys PureCloud platform or you’re considering moving to a cloud omnichannel contact center solution, we’ve made it easy to calculate your unique ROI.

First, you’ll need to collect some basic information about how your contact center operates:

  • Current annual revenue
  • Current number of call center agents
  • Current or expected number of additional seasonal call center agents
  • Number of months that seasonal agents work out of the year
  • Employee turnover percentage with the previous solution
  • Hours of downtime with the previous solution during the “low season”
  • Hours of downtime with the previous solution during the “high season”

We commissioned Forrester Consulting to create a calculator that takes these metrics and performs a personal ROI analysis for your business. In addition to ROI, you’ll get a quantified breakdown of costs and benefits in each category outlined above.

Use the free Forrester ROI calculator to get a custom report that details the economic impact of the PureCloud solution, based on your specific business environment. Also, check out the recent Forrester Consulting (“Forrester”)  Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to determine the financial impact the PureCloud platform can deliver.