A few years back, our CEO John Roman wrote a piece on Online Queso asking a question most e-commerce brands never bother to answer honestly: Is your CS department a profit center? In it, he shared the challenge he’d handed me: stop defending CS as a necessary cost and start proving it could pay for itself. That early experiment showed what was possible: 1,701 outreach attempts, a 23% response rate, and just over $44K in revenue that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.
That was the spark. What followed was four and a half years of disciplined, monthly tracking every dollar in, every dollar out to turn that proof of concept into a real, sustained profit center.
I want to share what those numbers actually look like now.
The scoreboard
Since we started keeping the books in September 2021, the BattlBox CS team has tracked 55 consecutive months of expenses and revenue against itself. The picture today:
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$1.67M in CS-generated revenue
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$884K in fully-loaded CS operating costs (staffing, Gorgias, Aircall, refunds, surprise & delight, the works)
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$782K in net profit contributed back to the business
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51 of 55 months profitable every full year since 2022 in the black
The four unprofitable months were the first four Sept through Dec 2021, when we were still building the muscle. We crossed into profitability in January 2022 and haven’t looked back.
The trajectory
What’s worth noting: our staffing cost has nearly doubled over that span (from $8,525/month to $14,850/month) as we invested in the team. Revenue grew faster than spend, every year.
Why the profit center angle holds up
Reframing CS as a profit center isn’t a finance trick; it changes how the team carries itself. Agents stop thinking like ticket-closers and start thinking like operators; every conversation becomes a chance to add value, not just resolve a complaint. It changes how leadership sees us, too. We’re no longer asking for headcount, we’re earning it. And in a year when most e-commerce brands are squeezing budgets, the departments framed as profit drivers are the ones that don’t get squeezed first. That’s the durable part of the angle.
What actually drove it
Three things, and none of them were complicated:
1. We treated the upsell motion as a real channel. Upsells alone account for $1.4M (84%) of every dollar of revenue we’ve recognized. That doesn’t happen by accident; it happens because every CSR knows the offers, knows the math, and gets credited for the win.
2. We measured it like a P&L, not a CSAT dashboard. Tickets and CSAT still matter, but we run the team off a monthly statement. When refunds spiked in late 2025 from a recharge error, we saw it the next month. When phone wins started compounding, we saw that too. Visibility forces accountability.
3. The CEO stayed in the loop. John didn’t hand me a goal and walk away. The original Online Queso article wasn’t a one-time thought experiment; it became the template for how we report. That partnership is the part that’s hardest to replicate elsewhere, and it’s the part I’m most grateful for.
The lesson for other operators
If you’ve read John’s original piece and you’re wondering whether the math actually holds up over years instead of months, for us, it has. The tracking we built mattered, but it wasn’t the whole story; it was a way of holding ourselves accountable to the same standard the rest of the business gets held to. The bigger shift was cultural, getting the team to see themselves as a contribution to the P&L rather than a line item on it.
CS doesn’t have to be a fully self-funding profit center for every brand. But it can be a lot more than a cost center, and the brands willing to do that work tend to find real upside on both sides of the equation.
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Luke Bagley leads Customer Service at BattlBox. The CS profit center has contributed $782K in net profit since its inception in September 2021.
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