How to Build a Budget for Call Center Services [With Template]

Call center companies are known to streamline business processes using dedicated agents to interface with prospects and existing customers. This frees up valuable time for companies to reinvest internally and positively impacts their bottom line.

While all types of call centers can be helpful in the right scenario, it’s important to understand the differences between their specializations to ensure you seek the right provider for your needs.

Types of Call Centers:

• Outbound Call Center: makes calls for clients for telemarketing, lead generation, and other outreach purposes
• Inbound Call Center: takes incoming calls for customer experience purposes, acting as customer service representatives for feedback, appointment setting, and more.

While these centers likely sound similar, their differences may account for anomalies in call center pricing due to varying operating costs dependent on agency type.

What is Included in Call Center Services Budgets

When breaking down a call center budget, four main categories make up total costs that all companies should take into account.

1. Service Provider Costs: this includes the base service costs, which are primarily what you’re paying for when you hire a call center. This can involve the staffing, the number of hours needed, and the specializations required for interactions to be successful. Companies can expect to pay hourly rates or by how long agents interact with customers in a given pay period.
2. Personnel Costs: these are all costs associated with call center agent salaries and associated benefits. This may also include costs and resources for onboarding and training, so the pricing structure and overall budget will scale with the number of agents and amount of training needed to get teammates up to speed.
3. Technology and Infrastructure: includes the cost of call center software and tools and integrations intended to facilitate and optimize routing and handling of calls (ex. IVR for answering services). This can also include equipment and data security measures necessary to function optimally.
4. Quality Assurance: costs associated with monitoring to ensure metrics and KPIs are met. This includes omnichannel tracking and efforts going toward improving performance

By thinking about your budget using these categories, budgeting should start to feel a lot simpler — especially for small businesses. Mapping out your budget this way creates several opportunities for cost savings.

Research Types of Call Center Options

Before you do anything else, it’s important to have a lay of the land. Researching different types of call center service providers is a great first step to understanding what services and deliverables they actually provide.

Your budget will be dependent on the exact service provider you choose, so research will also help you learn about where there is potential wiggle room in your finances. Think through the ideal location, expertise, and types of services you’ll need to set the bar for your spending.

Calculate Expected Workload

Oftentimes, BPO and call center services employ pricing models based on volume. For instance, companies may scale their pricing depending on the number of calls, emails, text responses, or other targeted customer interactions.

Knowing this, it can be helpful to do a ballpark estimate of how many engagements you want to occur on a weekly or monthly basis. Entering into interviews with this metric in mind will help potential call center partners understand the scope of your needs and staff against it.

At this stage, don’t worry about being too exact with your estimate. It’s still early in the process, so all you need is a general range to give most centers a good idea of your goals.

Account for Necessary Technology and Infrastructure

It may not be expected for companies to provide their team with any in-house equipment, but it’s absolutely essential to track these expenses if they’re necessary.

Technology expenses should include any hardware or software that is specifically purchased for call center activity and usage by call center agents.

Some of these tools may include:

• microphones and headsets
• additional CRM seats (or users)
• VoIP devices
• call center software

Calculate Staffing Costs

Generally going hand in hand with volume-based charges, staffing is an important factor that can scale the costs of call centers significantly. The more agents staffed on your project, the more expensive operational costs will be.

If you plan on augmenting internal customer service or experience staff with outsourcing, be sure to factor in any salaries and benefits you’re extending to new teammates as well.

Consider the Need for Training and Onboarding

It’s highly unlikely that your new agents don’t need any training at all to start being effective for your business.

The cost of initial training and the writing and introduction of scripts can stall execution at the very beginning of a collaboration. However, it’s important to factor in the cost of regular skills development training sessions to be sure that the agents you hire are doing their jobs as effectively as possible.

This also keeps agents at the top of their game, well-prepared to address customer needs or concerns.

Evaluate Return on Investment (ROI) and Refine Budget

Budgets should be considered living documents — they should be employed to examine a service provider’s performance against ROI goals.

Looking back to ROI will not only let you know when your partner is performing well, but it may even help you justify additional spend for services. Improved customer service and faster-moving processes can have huge downstream impacts. Considering ROI in these cases is essential in keeping your budget up-to-date.

Call Center Services Budget Template

Download our free call center services budget template here.

Factors that Influence Call Center Pricing

The average salary of a call center agent is far from all that goes into determining the cost of working with a call center. These are the top four influencers of overall call center costs.

1. Service Type: The difficulty and experience needed to deliver certain tasks will affect pricing. For instance, basic tasks like answering customer inquiries are less expensive than specialized services like technical support or outbound sales.
2. Volume of Interactions: This can be quantified by the call volume or number of emails, chats, or interactions your call center handles. The more your center takes on will increase costs directly — this is a primary driver of cost. This is part of the reason estimating needs accurately is so critical.
3. Location: Different geographic locations can raise or lower labor costs, especially if companies choose an offshore team where the cost of living is lower such as India, Latin America, or the Philippines. Working with companies in different time zones also has its benefits outside of cost savings.
4. Technology Needs: It’s not expected that you hire an in-house call center, so it may not be necessary to provide your partner company with any of the infrastructure necessary to deliver. However, any software or hardware bought to improve the efficiency of call center operations can easily scale up the average cost of a call center engagement.

Budgeting for Call Center Companies Helps Limit Outsourcing Costs

Call center services can be game-changers for those in need of a cost-effective customer satisfaction boost. While they can make big impacts, businesses must prepare to budget closely to make the situation work for them.

Keeping accuracy at the heart of call center outsourcing activity will ensure a smooth collaboration both in communication and in revenue.

About the Author

Sydney Wess SEO Manager at Clutch

Sydney Wess is a SEO manager who focuses on strengthening organic performance and building topical authority for Clutch.

See full profile