Contact Centers Are a Growing Industry

The global call centers market is projected to reach $337.8 billion by 2018, driven primarily by increasing corporate focus on providing efficient customer service as a part of business development, according to a new report from Global Industry Analysts (GIA). 

Renewed business process outsourcing and increasing use of innovative IT technologies also augur well for the future of this market, the analyst firm says.

Against a backdrop of rising competition, tighter regulatory pressures, the emergence of disruptive technologies, rising consumer demands, splintering of the customer base, and volatile economic climate, call centers are re-emerging  as important instruments to create value for customers and shareholders. The scale of rigorous process improvement and standardization achieved by call centers of late, additionally. make these establishments perfect partners for corporate success, GIA reported.

Mirroring the trend is the growing adoption of latest information technology, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), call routing, ACD, interactive voice response systems , VoIP, computer-telephony integration, and sophisticated CRM tools by call centers, according to the firm.\

Another major trend witnessed in this industry by GIA is the integration of social media with the contact centers. Call centers are gradually taking up image management roles for client companies and integrating social media context modules into their solutions to enable agents to quickly identify social media conversations most relevant to the clients' businesses.

Also of note is the delivery of call center services in the form of mobile apps. Thanks to the smartphone revolution, call center companies are launching apps for the customer to directly interact with the call centers using their smartphones. With smartphones poised to emerge as the preferred mode of communication, call centers are projected to offer enhanced value added services through mobile apps.

With the tough economy stress-testing value propositions, hosted contact centers are a rising trend in the world call center industry. Lower cost and lower end call center services, such as help desk and technical support, are increasingly being delivered as a service over the Internet. Financial benefits like lower upfront costs, greater control and visibility, easy low-cost access to latest technology, and pay-as-you go pricing are key factors driving the adoption of hosted call centers. The breadth of hosted offerings is also expanding to include advanced contact center functionality like outbound dialing, quality monitoring, speech self-service, and workforce management.

As stated in the report, the United States remains the largest regional market, accounting for a lion's share of the market pie. Asia-Pacific represents the fastest growing market, with revenue from the region projected to wax at a compound annual growth rate of 18.9 percent through 2018.

Major players in the marketplace include [24]7, Acumen Telecomunicaciones, Alliance Data Systems, Expert Global Solutions, Aspect Software ATOS Avaya, BT Communications (Ireland), Capita Customer Management, Convergys, Datamatics Global Services, Dimension Data Group, Merchants Limited, Entel Call Center, EXL Service Holdings., Genpact, GTL, HCL BPO Services NI, IBM Global Process Services, Plusoft Informatica, Quality Plus Callscan Australia, Sitel, Stream Global Services, Sykes Enterprises, Teleperformance, TRG Customer Solutions, West, and Wipro Technologies.

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