The monthly cost of a call centre is easy to find. The set-up cost is where budgets go wrong, because half of it is optional and nobody tells you which half.
Here is the whole list, with an honest note on what you can leave out.
The room
A call centre needs somewhere quiet enough that a customer cannot hear the next conversation. That is the only real requirement.
For three to five agents, a corner of an existing office works. Soft furnishings help more than partitions. For ten or more, you want a separate room, because the noise floor rises faster than you expect.
Can you skip it? Yes, if your agents work from home. That moves the cost to their internet connection and removes the supervisor walking the floor, which is a genuine trade rather than a free win.
The kit
Per agent: a laptop or desktop that can run a browser, and a headset.
A decent USB headset is the single best purchase you will make. Expect to spend real money here — the cheapest ones have microphones that make a good agent sound incompetent. Budget for a spare, because one will break in the first month.
Can you skip it? The computer, no. The headset, no. Anything else on a vendor’s hardware list — IP phones, a PBX appliance, a recording server — belongs to the older way of buying and is not needed if your software runs in a browser.
The number
One Kenyan number, which your customers dial.
A mobile-format number is the most answered, because it looks like a number a person would call. A landline-format number looks established. A toll-free 0800 number is the one where you pay for the call, which is a marketing decision rather than a technical one.
Costs vary by type and provider. One line is included with every plan we sell; extras are KSh 1,000 a month. If you are buying elsewhere, ask whether the number is rented or bought, and what happens to it if you leave.
Can you skip it? No. But you can skip buying three.
Porting the number you already advertise
If your customers already dial a number that is printed on your vehicles, moving it is worth real effort. Sometimes it can be ported; sometimes the sensible answer is to forward it into the new system.
Either way, budget time rather than money, and do not print anything new until it is settled.
The licence question
This is where Kenyan budgets most often include a number that should not be there.
If you are using a call centre service, you are a customer of a licensed provider in the same way you are a customer of a mobile network. You do not need your own telecommunications licence to answer your own phone.
If you are becoming the carrier — reselling voice, terminating calls for others, operating your own switching — that is a different business and the Communications Authority’s licensing framework applies to you.
Most businesses setting up a call centre are in the first category. If somebody quotes you a licensing fee as part of a call centre set-up, ask precisely which licence, for what activity, in whose name. There is more on this here, though you should confirm your own position with the Authority rather than with a vendor.
The software
The part you are probably here for.
Older vendors sell this as a project: a set-up fee between roughly KSh 180,000 and KSh 350,000 depending on seats, with call charges and support on top. Cloud vendors sell it as a monthly fee with no set-up at all.
Our own position is the second: no set-up fee, from KSh 1,780 a month. We will quote separately if you want us to record your menus professionally or train a floor of agents, but nobody has to buy that to start.
Training
Half a day, not a week.
Agents learn the phone in an afternoon because a phone works the way a phone works. What takes longer is agreeing what they say and what they do with what they learn — and that is a management task, not a software one.
A realistic small budget
For a three-person support desk, starting from nothing, in a room you already have:
- Three headsets, bought properly, plus one spare
- Nothing else in hardware if the computers exist
- One number, included with the plan
- No set-up fee, no licence of your own
- Half a day of everybody’s time
That is a few tens of thousands of shillings, mostly in headsets, and a monthly cost under two thousand. Anybody quoting six figures to put three people on a phone line is selling you the older model. It may still suit you — but you should know that is what you are buying.
The full rate card is here, and the step-by-step version of this is here.