Frost & Sullivan: Multichannel and Technology-Enabled Solutions Drive Growth in the North American Contact Center Outsourcing Market
-- Research observes a new generation of social consumers
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, Feb. 12, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Rapid change characterizes today's customer contact landscape. Consider that an increasingly influential Generation Y has high purchasing power and continues to experiment with new technologies. Indeed, impactful consumer trends, combined with the proliferation and expansion of automated and non-voice channels, is driving momentum in the realm of technology-based customer service specifically. As a result, while the explosive growth of social media has helped create a cacophony of consumer voices, enterprises are looking to outsourced service providers more than ever for guidance on social media strategies, technologies, and tactics. In essence, in 2014, contact centers are viewed as a central place from which a company's "brand advocates" can improve the Customer Experience while negotiating social customer behavior via channels such as blogs, customer forums, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google.
New research from Frost & Sullivan entitled, North American Contact Center Outsourcing Market Analysis, finds the contact center outsourcing market in North America is projected to surpass $28 billion in market revenue by 2017. Perhaps most intriguingly, the business segment known as technology-based services will see the most growth, with a CAGR surpassing 12 percent, compared to a CAGR of just over 3 percent for traditional, agent-based services.
"An increasing number of consumers are going mobile, and doing so on multichannel, web-enabled smartphones and tablets," said Stephen Loynd (www.frost.com/sloynd), program director at Frost & Sullivan. "It is therefore essential to implement strategies that proactively create value for customers. To do so, providers must focus on multi-channel solutions in order to address the needs of a younger demographic."
While consumers are changing, one implicit question Frost & Sullivan posed throughout its recent research is whether companies are changing fast enough to keep up. How are enterprises responding to the times? Are companies and their outsourced partners succeeding in delivering a holistic, unified Customer Experience?
"In some ways, there's a real sense of vertigo in this industry as new technologies are emerging in the world of customer contact and old models are receding. At the center of this dynamic is a rapidly changing, ever-more influential consumer," continued Loynd. "Over the next five years, providers that differentiate and compete on multichannel capabilities and value-add technology solutions will have an edge over providers that largely compete on cost, location, and labor arbitrage. How will providers re-invent themselves and re-imagine the contact landscape?"
These kinds of dynamics mean that enterprises must rethink and rework their outsourcing contracts, and challenge providers to deliver deeper customer engagement and customer lifecycle capabilities. At the same time, outsourcers are augmenting their value-add technology offerings, such as analytics, hosted and cloud-based contact center applications and managed services. Businesses also are adopting advanced unified communications and collaboration (UCC) tools such as social networking technologies, mobility, and video conferencing in order to improve productivity, remote worker collaboration, and customer service.
"It is important that the best outsourcing vendors are perceived as true strategic partners to their clients, helping them innovate and providing significant value-add to the client business and to the client brand," added Loynd. "This involves a proactive approach with clients, particularly when it comes to discussing the evolution towards an omni-channel world. Those that fall short in this area will not make the new 'short list' of providers."
The new research, North American Contact Center Outsourcing Market Analysis, is part of the Customer Contact program at Frost & Sullivan. For more information on this specific research, and the program's other offerings, please email Britni Myers, Corporate Communications, at britni.myers@frost.com.
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