Traditionally, contact centres were perceived as cost centres for the company, at best useful for preventing revenue loss. But as product experiences became more customer-centric and service quality was paramount, organisations quickly realised that contact centres had an important role to play in revenue generation as well.
And this isn’t just limited to outbound contact centres.
Inbound, too, can aid in cross-selling and upselling, which has a direct impact on your topline. The revenue per call KPI helps you quantify this impact and maximise a contact centre’s potential for revenue generation.
What is Revenue Per Call? Definition and Formula
You can define revenue per call as the average revenues earned from a single telephonic interaction with a customer/prospect via a contact centre (both inbound and outbound). Even if some interactions don’t immediately result in a sale (for example, a first-time-connect call that becomes an explore call), the cumulative outcome of all interactions will reflect your average revenue.
Revenue per call is also termed as revenue per successful call, eliminating abandoned/dropped calls from the calculation. You could also refer to this KPI as net income per call.
To calculate your average revenue per call for a given period or an agent, follow this formula:
Total revenues generated by the contact centre in a given period or by an agent ÷ total number of calls handled
Note: In an omnichannel contact centre, this will be calculated as average revenue per interaction.
How Frequently Should You Measure Revenue Per Call?
There are two types of KPIs in a contact centre, service metrics and topline indicators, and revenue per call falls into the latter category.
Also, any actionables informed by revenue per call typically requires long-term planning – e.g., instituting sales incentives or launching promotions. Therefore, it is helpful to calculate revenue per call at regular intervals – mapped across a month, a quarter, a fiscal, or several years instead of in real-time. This will surface insightful trends and help to intervene in a manner that boosts your revenue.
Why is Revenue Per Call Important?
By studying revenue per call trends, you can take steps to motivate your workforce to perform better, increasing the value generated by your contact centre.
Some of the key workforce management measures informed by this metric include:
- Shift allocation – Merit-based shift bidding to reward above–average revenues
- Campaign design – Outbound campaigns to boost revenue per call rate
- Fixed cost optimisation – Ensuring that excessive opex does not dilute revenue impacts
- Workforce engagement – Rewards and recognition for agents with high revenue per call
- Labour cost optimisation – Creating profit-sharing compensation models for outbound agents
In other words, this KPI tells you how and where to tweak resource utilisation strategies so as to keep profitability to a maximum.
Advanced technologies like contextual insights and agent assist now help contact centres to significantly boost their revenue per call without cutting into operational expenses. By equipping agents with the tools they need for cross-selling, upselling, and delivering memorable experiences, you can establish yourself as a proven profit centre for the organisation.
