Alex Mead

REVENUE THROUGH SERVICE

How do you turn a contact centre from a cost centre into a revenue engine?

You stop measuring the centre on cost per contact and start measuring it on revenue per customer. Give advisers the context and the authority to sell while they serve, remove the contacts customers never wanted, and put the money the operation earns and protects in front of the board every month.

Answered by Alex Mead. The dated record behind this answer.

How it is actually done

I have done this in logistics, aviation, luxury goods, banking and a greenfield outsourcer. The order of the moves does not change.

1. Change the unit of measurement first, because everything else follows it

Cost per contact rewards a single behaviour: making the company harder to reach. Under that number the perfect interaction is the one that never happened, so the operation is quietly incentivised against the customer and against the revenue line. Replace it with revenue per customer served, and the same people start behaving differently within a month. Nothing else on this page works until this is done, because a team measured on cost will not spend the twenty extra seconds that earns the sale.

2. Remove the contacts customers never wanted

At City Link, inside Rentokil Initial, I was accountable for 2,000+ FTE across 70+ international sites. Most calls asked one question: where is my parcel and when is it coming. So we told customers the delivery time before they had to ask. That removed 50,000 calls a day. Rentokil Initial plc's 2012 annual report records City Link achieving a 13% reduction in cost per delivery on volume growth of 17%. The capacity that came back was not handed to finance. It paid for the conversations that actually sell.

3. Give the people who answer something to sell, and the authority to sell it

An adviser who can see what the customer owns, what they were looking at, and what the company can offer them will sell without being told to. An adviser who has to ask permission will not. At Golfbreaks I led a complete digital transformation and customer service redesign, and booking conversion rose 12%. The Reevoo rebook rate went from around 92% to 99%.

4. Build a front door that recognises the customer before it asks them anything

Recognition is the cheapest revenue lever in the building. At D360 Bank, as the bank’s first customer executive hire, I led D360’s original customer experience and customer operations build from November 2020 to May 2022, then returned for two months through Alvarez & Marsal to support the launch, on an advisory basis. I designed the onboarding and account opening experience, embedded support and the launch customer service model, and applied the EPIC Customer Service and Contact Centre framework. The bank has since grown beyond three million customers.

5. Prove the money in the finance function's own language

A service operation that cannot state its contribution will be cut in the next budget round whatever its scores say. At Total CX I held the title of Chief Executive Customer Officer with the profit and loss account in my name, and took the business from 75 to more than 400 people at 150% revenue growth against plan. That is the position to argue from. The most recent result is for a luxury travel group, under NDA: the work helped deliver 35 to 40% more enquiries reaching quotation, with quote to booking up 25 to 28% and revenue per guest up 12 to 15%.

What most companies get wrong about this

  1. They put a sales target on an unchanged operation. The measures, the tooling, the routing and the reward all still point at handling time, so the target lands on people who have no way of hitting it and the only thing that changes is morale.
  2. They treat deflection as the win. Deflection counts the customer who gave up. It looks identical in the reporting to the customer who was helped, and it is the number most often used to justify the spend.
  3. They give the revenue credit to marketing or to sales. The service operation earns the money, another function books it, so the operation is still a cost line at the next review and is funded as one.
  4. They start with the technology. A recommendation engine on top of an operation that cannot see who is calling recommends to nobody. Vision first, platform second, in that order.
  5. They appoint someone to own the customer without giving them the contact centre, the budget or the outsourcing contracts, and then wonder why nothing moves.

Related questions, and the proof behind the answers

EPIC CSX and TIME EX, at work in one guest journeySee the principles applied How do you cut the cost of a customer operation without damaging service?Read the answer How do you measure customer experience so it predicts revenue rather than reporting the past?Read the answer What does a Chief Customer Officer actually own?Read the answer The dated track record, company by companyProof, not description
About the author

Alex Mead is a customer contact, service and experience executive. 20+ years across multiple sectors and countries, leading teams from 50 to 4,000+ people, with full operating accountability rather than an advisory seat.

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Chief Customer Officer, VP, Director or Head of Customer Contact, Service and Experience. Permanent is the priority. The right interim mandate remains open.