- Written by Stuart Green - Contact Centre Account Director
- Connect with Stuart on LinkedIn
Operating a contact centre is resource-intensive. With agents addressing a steady stream of customer issues and enquiries, IT teams managing a backlog of support tickets, and supervisors handling escalations, opportunities for cost optimisation often take a back seat.
As operational demands increase, expenses can escalate placing significant strain on budgets. Many contact centres find themselves at a crossroads – the need to reduce costs is clear, but doing so without compromising service quality or overburdening already stretched teams presents a complex challenge.
Here are the top 5 tried-and-tested cost optimisation strategies for CX leaders
If you’re not sure where to start, these approaches have delivered results across a variety of industries and contact centre sizes.
1. Embrace Call Deflection
Not every customer query requires a live agent. Many routine or repetitive requests like checking an order status, resetting a password, or updating account details can be resolved through well-designed self-service channels. Call deflection tools such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), and AI-powered chatbots help reroute these low-complexity interactions away from human agents and toward automated systems that provide fast, accurate responses.
This improves response times and customer satisfaction, but also significantly reduces operational costs by lowering call volumes, minimising queue times, and allowing agents to focus on more complex or high-value interactions. By easing the burden on your team, call deflection creates a more efficient workforce model and one that scales without the need for constant headcount increases.
This improves response times and customer satisfaction, but also significantly reduces operational costs by lowering call volumes, minimising queue times, and allowing agents to focus on more complex or high-value interactions. By easing the burden on your team, call deflection creates a more efficient workforce model and one that scales without the need for constant headcount increases.
2. Outsource to Self-Service
Customers are increasingly comfortable and in many cases, prefer to resolve issues on their own. Investing in self-service solutions such as a robust, searchable knowledge base, AI-powered virtual agents, and automated onboarding or troubleshooting journeys, you can empower customers to get the help they need without waiting in a queue or speaking to an agent.
This shift not only delivers faster resolutions and greater customer satisfaction, but also significantly reduces inbound contact volumes across voice and digital channels. Fewer incoming requests mean fewer agents are needed to handle routine interactions, allowing you to better allocate your resources and reduce staffing costs. Self-service tools are highly scalable so once built, they can serve thousands of users simultaneously at little incremental cost, making them an efficient, cost-effective way to deliver consistent support at scale.
View our guide that explores how you can reduce overheads with AI
Achieving the balance between delivering high-quality customer experience and maintaining financial stability within your contact centre requires careful navigation. This handy guide explains how you can achieve exactly this.
3. Implement Workforce Management Software
Staffing is one of the biggest expenses in any contact centre. It is often as much as 70% of the total budget. Yet, many contact centres still rely on manual scheduling or outdated forecasting methods, leading to inefficient use of resources. Workforce Management (WFM) platforms, particularly those enhanced by AI, offer a smarter, data-driven approach.
By analysing historical patterns, real-time activity, and seasonal trends, these tools can accurately forecast demand and dynamically align staffing levels with expected call volumes. This helps prevent overstaffing during quiet periods and understaffing during peaks, both of which can be costly either in wasted staffing spend or in service level failures that damage customer experience.
WFM systems also improve agent schedule adherence, streamline shift planning, and allow for more flexible work arrangements such as split shifts or remote rotations. With better visibility into performance metrics and staffing needs, supervisors can make informed decisions faster, reducing the administrative burden and optimising spend. WFM platforms ensure you’re only paying for the capacity you actually need.
4. Use AI to streamline operations and lighten the load
If your team doesn’t have the time or resources to conduct deep-dive performance and cost analyses, AI-powered technology can bridge the gap quickly and effectively. Today’s contact centre platforms are more intelligent than ever, capable of automating analysis, flagging inefficiencies, and even recommending changes based on performance data. They can continuously monitor operations, analyse large volumes of interaction data, identify patterns, and flag inefficiencies in real time whether it’s a recurring process bottleneck, an underperforming agent workflow, or unnecessary steps inflating average handle time.
AI also helps drive faster decision-making. Instead of spending hours manually generating and reviewing reports, CX leaders can rely on AI-generated dashboards and insights to pinpoint exactly where optimisation is needed. Many platforms even go a step further by proactively recommending actions to improve efficiency such as adjusting schedules, automating repetitive tasks, or refining scripts all based on historical performance and predictive analytics.
By using AI for these processes you can reduce extensive manual reporting, free up team leaders to focus on more strategic priorities, and uncover cost-saving opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed. Over time, this continuous improvement loop driven by AI can lead to significant cost reductions, better resource utilisation, and a more agile, data-driven contact centre.
5. Consider hiring a Business Consultant
Sometimes, a fresh perspective is exactly what’s needed to uncover inefficiencies that internal teams may be too close to see. Hiring a business consultant with contact centre expertise can provide an objective view, bringing both strategic insight and industry best practices to the table. A consultant can audit current operations, including agent performance, customer journey mapping, and workflow efficiency, identifying where time, effort, or resources are being misallocated, and where technology, training, or process redesign can deliver immediate and long-term savings.
One of the most valuable contributions a consultant can provide is a detailed gap analysis highlighting misalignments between your current practices and your desired performance outcomes. This might reveal, for example, that a lack of real-time reporting is delaying decision-making, or that certain customer queries are being escalated unnecessarily due to knowledge gaps or poor documentation.
This targeted insight provides a clear roadmap for where you can implement improvements whether that’s investing in more effective agent training, automating manual tasks, optimising your tech stack, or redesigning processes to eliminate friction. Rather than trial-and-error changes, you’ll have a clear plan backed by data and external expertise, accelerating your ability to reduce costs while maintaining or even improving the customer experience.
Download our contact centre cost optimisation checklist
Our consultants have created this practical checklist, designed specifically for CX Directors who want to streamline contact centre operations without compromising service quality. It’s full of clear, actionable prompts to help you uncover hidden savings, drive efficiency, and build a more scalable, customer-centric contact centre.
Optimise your contact centre operations and enhance CX
The belief that cost savings must come at the expense of customer experience is outdated. With the right strategy and tools, you can reduce overheads, increase operational agility, and elevate your CX at the same time.
The key? Stop trying to do it all manually. Let automation, AI, and innovative technology help you uncover hidden savings without impacting the service your customers value.
Need help identifying the right tools for your contact centre?
We’re here to help you build a future-ready operation that’s cost-efficient, customer-centric, and ready to scale.
Opus have a team of specialists contact centre consultants, who have delivered the above solutions for several of our clients. Please get in touch as we would love to share how we have achieved this and understand your businesses needs in more detail to suggest how we could potentially enhance your contact centre operations using AI.
Read our live client feedback
