From Cost Center to Profit Engine: How Winning Companies Are Reframing Their CX Investments

Every day, contact center managers across the country wake up to the same brutal reality: another budget meeting where they’re asked to justify their existence. Another spreadsheet showing cost-per-call metrics. Another stakeholder asking why they can’t just “automate everything” or “move it all offshore.”

But here’s what those people are missing—and what forward-thinking companies are discovering: Your contact center isn’t a necessary evil. It’s an untapped profit engine.

The companies that understand this aren’t just surviving the current economic climate—they’re thriving. While their competitors slash customer service budgets and wonder why retention rates plummet, these organizations invest in CX excellence and watch their topline soar – with estimates between 10-20%.

The Great Reframe: Thinking Beyond Operational Metrics

It would not be surprising to see companies spend 80% of their customer-focused budget on acquisition and just 20% on retention.

But consider this: acquiring a new customer costs six to seven times more than retaining an existing one. And the likelihood of creating new revenue is 14 times as high for existing customers vs new ones. You can see how your contact center sits at the heart of that retention equation, handling millions of dollars worth of customer relationships every single day.

Yet the business world too often has treats customer service as a cost center—something to minimize, optimize, and ideally eliminate.

A simple but profound shift in thinking is required: Instead of asking “How can we handle calls more cheaply?” winning companies ask “How can we make each customer interaction more valuable?”

This reframe changes everything. Suddenly, your agents aren’t a cost burden- they’re revenue generators. Your call volume isn’t a burden – it’s opportunity knocking. And your customer service department isn’t a cost center – it’s your competitive advantage.

The Hidden Value Generator: How Much Money Is Your Contact Center Really Worth?

Let’s talk numbers. A single customer service interaction can easily create hundreds of dollars in additional downstream revenues over the following 12 months. That’s not a typo.

Here are some key factors driving that impact:

Revenue Multiplier: Customers who have a positive service experience are 2.2x more likely to purchase more from an organisation than those who have had an unsatisfying experience.

Word-of-Mouth Amplification: Each satisfied customer influences an average of 9 other potential customers. Poor service experiences are shared with 16 people on average. Your contact center is literally manufacturing your reputation at scale.

Lifetime Value Protection: Depending on the industry, customer lifetime values are often higher than $1000. But whatever the value in your industry is, NPS Promoters create lifetime values that are 6-14 times that of detractors. Every customer your team saves from becoming a detractor – or churning – preserves that entire value stream.

When you add it up, a mid-sized contact center handling 50,000 interactions annually isn’t managing costs—it’s stewarding millions in customer lifetime value.

Beyond Cost-Per-Call: Metrics That Make A Difference

If you’re still measuring success primarily through operational efficiency metrics like average handle time and cost-per-call, you’re optimizing only for a small subset of the outcomes you want. While efficiency is the basis of everything, winning companies also track metrics that connect directly to business value.

Here are key metrics we recommend our clients measure and optimize for—beyond the efficiency metrics that form the foundation of a well-run contact center.

Typical Key metrics to optimise business impact

• Revenue per Interaction: Track the downstream purchasing behavior of customers who contact your center
• Upsell/Cross-sell Conversion: Measure how often agents identify and convert revenue opportunities
• Customer Value Retention: Monitor the CLV of customers before and after service interactions
• Relationship Strength Index: Merge NPS per interaction and relationship depth changes. NPS shows satisfaction/advocacy, while “depth changes” reflects actual behavioral follow-through.
• Account Revenue Expansion: Track how service quality influences account growth
• Competitive Win-rate: Monitor how service excellence wins back at-risk customers

You can start tracking some of these metrics by just implementing a simple weekly data review. Begin with your CRM data to identify correlations between service interactions and subsequent purchasing behavior. Start small—even analyzing just 5-10 customer journeys per week will reveal patterns. Within 30 days, you’ll have enough data to establish baseline metrics and identify which customer interactions are truly driving business value.

For organizations ready to take a more transformative approach, the next step involves developing data-driven revenue attribution models that precisely measure the financial impact of service interactions. We help organizations build the infrastructure and knowledge to show which specific service interactions create downstream revenue, and how valuable each experience can be. And – most importantly – we can help implement the changes needed to capitalize on these insights. This isn’t just feel-good metrics—it’s hard ROI data that transforms budget conversations and helps your company win: Experience leaders grow at 2x over the laggards.

A Six-Step Transformation: From Cost Center to Profit Engine

Making this shift isn’t about wholesale revolution—it’s about systematic evolution. Here is an example of six strategic steps that will improve an in-house contact center’s business impact in less than 9 months:

Step 1: Build Revenue Tracking Infrastructure

A contact center can’t optimize for value if it can’t measure it. Integrating call platforms, CRMs, billing, and analytics creates a clear line of sight between customer interactions and downstream revenue. We don’t just support our clients in designing the reporting framework — we can implement it, too.

Step 2: Enable Agents to Recognize and Act on Value

Agents already sit at the center of value-creation conversations. With the right tools, prompts, and training, they can spot upsell moments, detect churn risk, and strengthen customer relationships without “hard selling.” With decades of experience in managing contact center operations, we can quickly deploy real-time agent assist tools, custom scripts, and frontline coaching.

Step 3: Automate the Right Interactions

Not every call needs a human. Once you know which interactions actually generate business impact, you can confidently automate the rest — whether through self-service IVR, chatbots, or AI-driven workflows. This isn’t about cutting headcount; it’s about focusing human expertise where it moves the revenue needle.

Step 4: Align Compensation and Recognition With Outcomes

Incentives drive behavior. When scorecards balance efficiency metrics with value metrics (saves, expansions, NPS), agents focus on long-term business impact instead of just call speed. We help clients manage that cultural change process. Atento’s CX Consulting teams can design and support rolling out compensation structures that actually work on the floor.

Step 5: Operationalize Proactive Outreach

Move beyond the contact center as a reactive tool. Using data signals (renewal dates, declining product usage, service complaints), centers can initiate value-building calls before customers think to leave. We help clients build the workflows, data triggers, and playbooks that make proactive outreach scalable for their own teams.

Step 6: Deliver Executive-Ready Value Reporting

The C-suite doesn’t want anecdotes — it wants evidence. Reporting should clearly demonstrate revenue attributed to service, accounts saved, and expansions won. We can help you implement automated dashboards and cadence reporting so leadership sees the value every month.

The Compound Effect: Watch This Transformation Accelerate Over Time!

The most powerful aspect of reframing your contact center as a profit engine is the compound effect. As your team gets better at creating value, customers become more loyal. More loyal customers are easier to serve, more profitable to retain, and more likely to recommend your company.

This creates a virtuous cycle: better service leads to better customers, which leads to better economics, which funds better service capabilities.

Within less than a year, organizations that commit to CX excellence get on the path to impacts like these:

• 5-10% improvement in customer retention rates, which can lead to 25-95% boost in profitability alone
• 15-25% increase in cross sell rates
• 30% lower-cost-to-serve and overall margin improvements
• 2-3x revenue growth vs competition

Companies that master value generation by CX don’t just improve their contact centers—they truly transform their business.

Your Next Move: From Insight to Action

The question isn’t whether your contact center can become a profit engine—it’s how quickly you can make the transformation. Every day you operate under the old cost-center constraints is another day of leaving money on the table.

You can start by looking at just one agent: Pick your top-performing agent and track the downstream revenue behavior of their customers for 90 days. You’ll likely discover that this single person is generating more value than you imagined.

The companies that thrive in the next decade won’t be those with the cheapest contact centers—they’ll be those with the most valuable customer relationships. Your contact center is where those relationships are built, maintained, and grown. Are you ready to unlock that value?

Atento CX Consulting helps companies identify and capture the hidden value in their customer service operations. We provide the frameworks, metrics, and strategic guidance to accelerate this transformation. Contact us to learn how your organization can start measuring and maximizing the revenue impact of every customer interaction.