Understanding the ROI: Reduced Contact Center Infrastructure Costs

As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Today’s customer journeys still start with a single channel, but they now also shift in countless different directions across multiple channels. To support these increasingly complex journeys, the first step is ensuring you have the right contact center infrastructure in place.

In the first part of my five-part series on understanding the potential return on investment of an Omnichannel Engagement Center, I highlighted the substantial impact of improved agent handling time. In our commissioned Total Economic Impact (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting, the companies that participated in the study saw an average 12.5% improved agent handling time when they deployed the Genesys Customer Experience Platform to support omnichannel customer experiences, journeys, and relationships. Over a five-year period, this greater efficiency resulted in an average financial savings of more than $19 million. For the second part of the series, I’m focusing on another key financial benefit: reduced infrastructure costs.

The Challenge of Maintaining Outdated Hardware

Companies across every industry are struggling to manage globally-dispersed contact center sites with increasing digital channels and varying technologies in place. Often, there is a mix of on-premises and outsourced agreements with third-party providers that are not standardized across the enterprise. The result is a lack of flexibility and scalability, siloed channels, and an inability to route calls through a central hub. Not only is having a patchwork of contact center technologies and solutions a tremendous IT challenge and a major obstacle to providing an omnichannel customer experience (CX), it’s also expensive to maintain.

With an outdated, multivendor contact center environment, there are the obvious hardware and software costs. Yet, there are also the less visible, annual maintenance contracts and IT labor costs which can add up to a significant amount, especially when you consider all the components of your system’s infrastructure, including voice and digital channels, employee engagement systems, CRM, back office systems, and more.

Making a Platform Decision

To break the cycle of sustaining outdated, costly infrastructure, the first step is making the switch to IP/SIP architecture with a platform that supports omnichannel customer service delivery. By deploying the Genesys Customer Experience Platform, infrastructure-related costs are reduced in a number of ways.

Elimination of Hardware Upgrades – With a scalable, future-proof, open system in place, new solutions and channels can be added easily over time without having to purchase additional hardware.

Lower Recurring Maintenance Costs – Ongoing maintenance costs are reduced significantly when there is no longer the need to manage multivendor, multi-location infrastructure.

Reduced IT Personnel Costs – IT staff can be centralized into one contact center team instead of having multiple teams supporting many point solutions. Solutions can be plugged in easily and efficiently as needed over time, minimizing time-consuming custom integration work to connect channels to engagement systems.

Adding Up the Savings

In the TEI Study, moving from an outdated, multivendor contact center environment to the Genesys Customer Experience Platform resulted in a reduction in infrastructure-related costs averaging $27 million over five years. Much of this savings was found immediately by consolidating and modernizing infrastructure and eliminating the need to pay for costly maintenance licenses, contracts, and service agreements.  These savings continued to grow as IT labor costs decreased.

A Win-Win Solution

Not only does adding the necessary infrastructure that supports omnichannel customer engagement enable you to address immediate and future customer needs, it also reduces many IT headaches you may be facing with your existing system. It pays for itself by reducing infrastructure costs.

Find out more about the ROI from transforming your contact center into an Omnichannel Engagement Center.

Watch the on demand webinar with Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Art Schoeller and myself.

Read the complete Forrester study: Total Economic Impact of Genesys Omnichannel Engagement Center Solution.