Budgeting Season, Achieving More CX on a Tighter Budget?

Achieving high operational performance while keeping costs in check can sometimes feel like like balancing precision and efficiency on a very tight deadline, it's possible but it requires a lot of coordination! As you know, it’s not just about making customers happy, it’s about doing it efficiently (and without breaking the bank).

As we enter a time of economic uncertainty in many industries and regions, businesses are looking for ways to get more value from every dollar spent, including CX operations. However, with the right strategies, these challenges present an opportunity too - not just to cut costs but to improve customer loyalty, increase sales, and build a stronger market presence.

Let’s explore some key areas where companies can unlock value and gain a competitive advantage, while reducing costs:

1. Customer Loyalty, The Gift that Keeps on Giving?

There’s an old saying in CX: “Happy customers don’t leave, and they bring friends.” Okay, maybe we just made that up, but it’s true! Customers who feel valued and heard stick around, spend more, and even do a little free advertising for you. It’s a win-win. Want to increase sales? Start by making your customers feel like they’re not just a number, issue resolution is as important as personalisation. Show them you care (without blowing the budget), and they’ll reward you with loyalty, repeat business, and a willingness to forgive the occasional hiccup.

One of the startegies to align better with customer expectations is to set the quality assurance right. Thats doesnt necessarily mean more investment, it just means tweaking and setting up a process that can truly deliver value to your organisation through understanding the voice of your customer better. The approach which we find most effective is to move away from a "transactional quality monitoring form checklist routine" and set up a differentiation into customer critical, buisness critical, and compliance critical. This also helps to look not just at agent level issues and learning/coaching needs, but also on program level to identify process level issues.

This will allow to understand which area is lacking the most and help differentiate defects, satisfaction and dissatisfaction drivers from a customer perspective for respective service journeys. Paired with high data integrity, based on statistically valid sample sizes, provides you a great starting point to become more customer centric, as well as cost efficient through identifying areas for improvment based on data, not guessing!

2. Processes, Because Who Doesn’t Love a Good Flowchart?

Let’s be real, processes are the unsung heroes of CX. Sure, they may not have the glamour of a big marketing campaign or the allure of shiny new tech, but without solid processes in place, things fall apart very fast. The magic happens when you adopt best-in-class processes that allow your team to consistently deliver an experience that leaves customers saying, “Wow, they really have their act together.”

Best part? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are frameworks (hello, COPC CX Standard!) that help you figure out which processes need a little attention and refinement to function at their best and help your team work smarter, not harder. We are believers that a well engineered process drivers desired outputs!

Not because we can be considered "process engineers" and have helped hundreds of global organisation improve their processes, but because we have lots of objective data proving the point - driving up to 49X the ROI measured through improving processes which in return improve service, quality, and that ultimately improves the CX while decreasing costs and improving profitability!

3. Efficiency, Or How to Save Money Without Sacrificing Quality?

Let’s talk about efficiency, it’s like getting a 2-for-1 deal at your favorite store. Who doesn’t love that? The trick here is to streamline operations so your team can deliver exceptional service without spending extra time (or money) doing it.

Think of it as a CX diet plan: trimming the fat without losing any muscle. Cut out the inefficiencies, and you’ll find that costs shrink, while performance stays strong (and your boss stays happy). In other words, companies often find that significant cost reductions can be achieved through streamlining processes, eliminating waste, and implementing automation solutions that improve speed and accuracy.

Lets take WFM as an example, optimizing schedule attainment, improving forecasting accuracy, consequently optimizing the occupancy by a few pp materilizes in meaningful savings through efficiency gains. We have done this together with many of our clients, with very limited investment through mainly transferring our knowledge through WFM training to our partners local teams. Curious? We have a lot of case studies and success stories to share!

4. BPO, Time to Make the Relationship Work?

Success depends not only on your internal capabilities but also on your external partnerships. The past couple of years were tough for both, brands and their outsourcing providers. Pandemic and moving entire contact centers into Work-From-Home environments, through signifcant inflation and increase in salaries and direct costs, up to current AI related hypes and significant technology challenges. While many outsourcing partnerships prevailed, other partnerships simply failed.

In the outsourcing world, vendor relationships can sometimes feel like trying to decipher a cryptic text from a friend - unclear and filled with potential pitfalls. But here’s the good news: with a little clarity and a lot of process and communication, these relationships can go from frustrating to very fruitful. Start by reviewing your vendor contracts. Are they pulling their weight? If not, it’s time to renegotiate and set some clear expectations which may reward the outsourcing partner as much as your own organisation. And remember, holding your vendors accountable isn’t just good business - it’s a great way to keep your own costs down while still delivering required flexiblity, quality and service.

I have spent 10+ years in the outsourcing world with Tier 1 providers. Trust me, there are tricks which you wouldnt consider possible, and worse - which are very hard to discover for people managing the outsourcing partner relationships. Discovering those grey areas, defining new requirements and reviweing your contracts with putting a solid control mechanism in place, can be more than rewarding for your next years budget - and your CFO's mood too!

5. Tech Partnerships, The Real MVPs?

At COPC, we believe that sustainable success in CX comes from clear insights and actionable recommendations. We live in an age where if something can be automated, it probably should be (except maybe customer empathy, let’s leave that to the humans). Partnering with technology specialists can help you build a more resilient infrastructure, improve service and quality, and create sustainable automation solutions that don’t just work for today but are built to last.

Automation is a huge trap, and many companies had to learn their lessons. We have all heard about RPA and/or GenAI based solutions providing misinformation to customers, significantly damaging loyalty and brand reputation. Or about the security implications through AI solutions. Sounds familiar? Lets not forget the legal implications it may cause on your organisation. The AI act which recently came into force can impose fines of up to 7 % of the annual total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year or EUR 35 000 000, whichever is higher! The key is to make sure your tech is working for you and your customers, not just taking up space on the budget sheet.

Also, what often is forgotten on these sheets is the costs of AI adoption - training employees and ongoing AI maintanance with adjusted org structures is beyond the implementation itself, a huge cost factor too! That means working with partners who actually understand your goals (and don’t just install things and vanish). I've written about technology solutions and AI already a long time ago before it actually became a hype, and I can only emphasize it here again: Technology is only a part of the CX game, its the value that technology and AI can bring to the table while managing the risks - it's not the AI itself that customers are looking for.

COPC, Your Partner In Balancing CX!

I hope the above points provided a bit of inspiration moving into your budgeting season. And yes, a little self-promotion at the end. At COPC, we like to think of ourselves as the Swiss Army knife of CX consultancy. We help you reveal areas for improvement through operational and technology assessments, prioritize solutions that truly deliver value for your organisation and customers, and develop roadmaps fully aigned to your needs that maximize your CX potential!

If you are looking for creating a path to sustainable delivery aiming at growth while optimally balancing your costs (yes, its possible!), or just planning to infuse best practices through CX training to your team members so you can reach new heights, don't hesitate to ask. We have truly a lot to offer, customized to your and your customer needs, and within budget too!