Putting the “R” in “ROI” for the Cloud Contact Centre

Helen Lancaster of Foehn discusses how you can increase your ROI after implementing a cloud contact centre.

You may have heard, a couple of weeks back we landed the Genesys EMEA Partner of the Year Award. It’s a huge achievement that tops a stream of other awards, accreditations and client wins over the past few years.

Since then, people have been asking what has made the difference? The answer is simple, we just stick to what has worked for us over the past 20 years – great people, great software and a philosophy that we make life simple for our clients in everything we do.

That last one covers a vast number of customer-focused activities, amongst which one is increasingly important – demonstration of return on investment (ROI).

A great example is offered by Forrester in their Total Economic Impact (TEI) analysis of Genesys PureCloud, a contact centre system we have deployed many times.

The TEI analysis identifies the cost, benefit, flexibility and risk factors that affect the investment decision.

Forrester models a ‘composite’ organization based on the aggregation of research from a sample of decision-makers and applies risk adjustment to give the model real-world results.

The composite business is an international organization averaging $100 million in annual revenue, has three contact centres in different time zones and employs 160 agents.

The model identifies six key advantages and calculates the Net Present Value of benefits for each over three years:

Cost advantage over legacy system: $1.2m
Cost advantage of scalability: $800k
Improved productivity: $2.6m
Improved employee retention: $250k
Increased income: $120k
Reduced downtime: $120k

With a total 3-year NPV over $4m, a payback period inside three months and an ROI over 500%, the Purecloud solution performance is impressive.

ROI calculation has great value, but it can be argued that delivery of ROI is the difficult part. It’s something we tackle in many different ways with approaches tailored to client business priorities.

Sometimes, it’s about customizing the system to optimize benefit, other times it’s about integrating with other apps and processes to achieve “2+2=5” synergy, or it could be more to do with scaling the system over time – starting with simple functionality on a small budget and growing functionality, more affordably, as revenues grow.