With the increased adoption of cloud-based services and social media, the contact center market is expected to grow at a fast rate. The global contact center market is expected to register a growth rate of approximately 9% and is expected to reach a total valuation of $380 billion by the year 2022. The highest user base for the contact centre market is in North America. Western Europe, the U.K. and some regions of the Middle East are some other regions using customer care on a large scale. In managing the outsourcing demand for contact center, India and Philippines are the leading countries. Buyers are encouraged to outsource contact centers to third parties due to the need for offering superior customer services for better customer experience.
What is a Contact Center?
A contact center manages interactions with customers and is a business division within an organization. They are different from call centers as call centers take requests of customers only over calls. Contact centers, on the other hand, handle communications over various mediums including call, web, chat, email, social media, messaging apps, text or fax. By using various types of technology, contact centers resolve customer issues quickly along with tracking customer engagement. Contact centers can be operated in an organization itself or can be outsourced to a third party.
The services provided can be of various types including personalized self-service, omnichannel customer engagement or virtual contact center.
Contact Center Market Trends
A lot of changes have surfaced in the contact center market for better customer experience. Social media and cloud-based services along with virtual agents have widely influenced the growth of the contact center market. Here are some of the market trends that made their place in the world of contact centers:
- Integration of Artificial Intelligence: AI provides a deeper predictive analysis for any business. With connections between various media channels and streamlined call center responses, it is no doubt AI has made its place everywhere.
- Digital Transformation: Customer experience is redefined from start to finish with a true digital contact center. Usage of integrating technologies also helps provide full customer context.
- Cloud Communication: Many companies are adopting cloud-based platforms to offer services to their customers. This allows the flexibility of contacting the customer from anywhere and anytime.
- Measurement of customer satisfaction: Customer care centers are now being integrated with various measurement tools to understand the satisfaction level of customers and incorporate any changes if required.
- Two-way social media conversations: It is not enough for channels to make witty posts or images. Two-way communications are being adopted for better customer experience.
Contact market size and analysis
Out of the total value of contact center market of 322 billion dollars, 80 percent contact center activities are kept in-house whereas 20 percent is outsourced. The trend of in-house centers dominating the market is expected to remain in the future as well. The overall market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 5 percent. The outsourcing contact center is expected to grow continuously. Despite the total share remaining the same, the U.S still is the leading customer in the outsourcing market. Western Europe, the UK and some parts of the Middle East come next in line for outsourcing contact market. With rising domestic demand, the Asia Pacific region is driving the outsourcing market of contact centers.
From the supply perspective, India and the Philippines are leading countries in managing the demand of outsourcing contact centers. Value-added services are used on large-scale shifting buyers focus from cost saving. Customer analytics and omni-channels are being used on a large scale by expanding the delivery location. Better value to buyers is provided through this over long-term contracts.
Market growth drivers
Various factors act as the growth drivers for the contact center market. The foremost factor being the increase in focus on customer service across all industries. Also, there is a shift in focus from cost saving to maximizing value to end customers. This happens due to rising customer demands and competition among businesses. Moreover, there is a need for specialized services and companies are spending higher amounts on outsourcing due to this shift in focus.
The demand is rising for contact center analytics and different support channels like social media or other round the clock app services. This, in turn, requires specialized services for better customer experiences. In order to partner with third party service providers, buyers are expected to spend more on outsourcing contact centers.
Also, only big companies are able to provide in-house contact centers on a large scale. Small and medium businesses are expected to depend on outsourcing in order to limit their expenses.
Market Constraints
As there are some driving forces that are expanding the market for contact centers, there are some impediments to its growth as well. The cost savings from outsourcing contact centers are reducing and then there is a rise in concerns for quality. This has influenced the buyer’s decision to outsource. Moreover, restrictions imposed by various regulations like Dodd-Frank Act, Basel III, OCC Guidelines and FRB also stop companies from sharing their personal, financial and confidential data. This restricts the scope of outsourcing in other regions.
Although the contact center market is facing certain challenges, the outsourcing vendors are also improving their range of services to stay relevant to the changing market trends. So, it can be safely analyzed that the market is going to expand in the future as well, albeit a bit slowly.
