Cost Per Call and Other Pay Per Call Metrics

A pay per call number is a phone number that’s owned by an advertiser, not the caller. This number can be used for a variety of purposes, such as generating leads and tracking marketing campaigns.

Keeping track of call center metrics, like cost per call, is important to ensure that your team is using resources wisely.

Cost-per-call

The cost per call is an important metric in the call center business that enables managers to measure the efficiency of their operations. It is also used as an indicator of how well the organization serves its customers.

As a result, it’s often a top priority for contact centers and their management teams. However, while reducing cost-per-call may be an important business objective, it shouldn’t come at the expense of quality customer service.

In fact, if your goal is to reduce costs without sacrificing service quality, you’ll need a strategic approach that takes the big picture into consideration.

Fortunately, modern call centers have many industry metrics to track and evaluate. Some of these include customer satisfaction (CSat) score, average handle time (AHT), net promoter score (NPS), occupancy rate, and first call resolution rate.

Cost-per-minute

When evaluating your digital ad campaigns, the cost-per-minute is one of the most important metrics. This metric allows you to compare how well your ads are performing against other traditional digital ad metrics like cost-per-click and bounce rate.

The cost-per-minute varies significantly between different companies, but it also depends on how many calls your agents make per minute and the value of each call type. For example, a sales call might require a higher skill level and pay than a customer service call checking an order status.

It’s important to choose a service that allows you to track and monitor your costs so you can see how much you’re paying for each minute spent on the phone by your agents. The best way to do this is by choosing a service that offers second-to-second billing.

Cost-per-transaction

Cost per transaction is a common metric that a business can use to calculate its total cost of service. This can help a company decide whether it needs to reduce costs in order to compete more effectively in the market.

This metric is also useful for understanding how much it costs to handle customer interactions. This is especially important when these interactions span multiple digital channels, such as email, chat, SMS and social media.

These multi-channel efficiencies can save companies money in the long run, which is why it’s so important to break your cost-per-call calculations by type of call and digital channel.

For example, sales calls may require a higher skill set and pay higher salaries than calls checking an order status. If you can get your cost-per-call calculations granular enough to identify these different types of calls, then you can optimize your staffing and routing. This can help you improve your customer experience and lower your cost-per-call.

Cost-per-agent

Cost per agent aka COA if you will is an important metric to benchmark your operations against, not just because it tells you how well your team performs but also reveals the true cost of doing business in your industry. This includes things like telephony hardware, data center infrastructure, and training for new hires, not to mention any marketing or advertising costs you may have invested.

The best way to get a handle on this number is to create a bespoke performance report that incorporates your specific contact centre metrics, like average agent call duration or the actual number of calls per day (or week). To do this, it’s helpful to have a clear set of guidelines that you can then use to calculate the most accurate figure. This will help you to identify areas of improvement, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and overall ROI.

The most cost effective solution is to adopt a multichannel approach to your customer service strategy, using channels such as email and web-submitted contacts to lower your operating costs by eliminating the need for voice channel handling. You can do this by reducing your cost per call, as well as improving staffing efficiencies, such as leveraging the latest cloud based software, and implementing the latest in customer experience technologies.