To Be A Profit Center, Stop Being A Silo By Keith Dawson, Senior Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

Traditional views of the contact center are very operational: people who work and manage in that environment have been trained to see what they do as expensive. Therefore, managers have always emphasized cost control. What they are measured on tends to be very activity-based: how many calls, how long the calls last, how many minutes of talk time per agent hour, and so forth.

These are necessary and valuable measures and views. But they miss the very concrete benefits that contact center activities deliver to the organization overall. They miss the incredible impact that the contact center has on profits and revenues. This is because until very recently, contact centers tended not to use value- or outcome-based metrics to account for its role. It's also because enterprises tend not to ask for those things from the contact center.

Another reason the value argument is missed is because the kinds of things that go into a successful customer experience are hard to measure and difficult to translate into terms that can be quantified. But as the familiar trope about contact centers being "cost centers vs. profit centers" becomes more of a cliche, we find that increasingly people are finding better ways to articulate the true value of contact center actions in an enterprise context.