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North American Contact Center Services Market
Frost & Sullivan, Feb 2005
Current Market Conditions Favor Top-tier Outsourcers
The increasing demand for inbound services and complex customer care services in the outsourced contact center market is creating revenue generation opportunities for larger providers that are capable of offering a more comprehensive and sophisticated range of services. Alternatively, vendors providing lower-end services are likely to find it increasingly challenging to sustain their position in the market due to downward pricing pressure and declining demand for outbound services. Concentration of revenue among top-tier outsourcers is likely to continue in the future due to rapid industry consolidation and larger multiyear deals. The top-tier participants possess the consulting and integration expertise necessary for complex end-to-end business process outsourcing and the innovative skills to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market.
This Frost & Sullivan research analyzes the key trends in the North American outsourced contact center market. In addition to the important drivers and challenges, the study offers revenue forecasts for inbound and outbound services, the multimedia and voice mediums, and vertical markets. This assists participants in understanding the potential growth areas and formulating their business strategies accordingly.
Outsourcers See Increased Opportunities in RightShoring
Offshoring of outsourced contact center operations continues to gain popularity in North America. However, the largest and most successful outsourcers realize that the decision to conduct operations offshore is a client-driven decision and are including RightShoring or BestShoring into their product offering. This encourages clients to be more selective while sending customer service operations offshore.
RightShoring follows the logic that distinct types of interactions are best suited for particular locales and regions, says the analyst of this research. Top-tier providers, therefore, advise their clients to offshore only transactions that are fairly well-defined and routine. For example, while India is regarded as the ideal offshore site for technical support queries, the more sales-oriented interactions either remain in North America or are sent to the Philippines where the service culture resembles that of the United States.
Customer Self-service Applications Provide New Growth Opportunities
While phone-based support remains the largest contributor to revenue for contact center outsourcers, the inclusion of self-service applications, particularly among the top-tier providers is an upcoming trend. The availability of high quality speech recognition engines is expected to drive the uptake of self-service applications. Customer acceptance of the self-service methods is also likely to increase as speech technologies become more widely deployed in interactive voice recognition systems.
While some outsourcers have embraced speech and are promoting it heavily, other providers are taking a `just in time’ approach and offering the technology only when clients demand it, observes the analyst. Once self-service is established in the outsourced contact centers market, it is expected to provide a low cost alternative to the offshoring of routine queries.
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