Domestic Growth Augurs Well For APAC Contact Centre Mkt

The rise in domestic demand for third-party services has firmly entrenched the Asia Pacific in the global contact centre outsourcing market. In 2011, 60.9 percent of the total revenue was from domestic markets, largely because of the upswing in the telecommunications and banking and financial services (BFS) sectors.

The telecommunications boom in India adds more than a million customers annually, making a robust case for outsourcing contact centre operations. Similarly, in China, the mushrooming of banks and multinational companies has popularised the outsourcing of customer relationship management (CRM) services.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan finds that the market earned revenues of US$17.18 billion in 2011 and estimates this to reach US$29.72 billion in 2017.

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Domestic growth, along with solid infrastructure, geographical and cultural proximity to western countries, and the presence of well-qualified, college-educated, and low-cost labor that can serve clients in multiple languages has made Asia Pacific the destination of choice for outsourcing.

This substantial market potential does not preclude concerns regarding quality of services and security features, due to which, many companies prefer to maintain contact centre services in-house.

Outsourcers are also hampered by issues of high churn, market saturation in various countries, increasing costs, anti-offshoring stance by many western countries, and a growing requirement for self-servicing in CRM.

“While certain companies do not wish to outsource, some are willing to outsource, provided the operations are on-shore or near-shore to locations with similar language, diction, and culture,” said Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Sathya Subramanian. “This bias can be attributed to apprehensions regarding a drop in both service quality and data security.”

Outsourcers are looking to win back customers’ confidence by implementing several new technologies and strategies that will help them improve the quality of services and offer better data security features. With the right kind of innovation and strategies, supported by the various governments in the region, outsourcers can maintain a healthy compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 percent from 2011 to 2017.

“Entities throughout the Asia Pacific region are exploring various hosted contact centres and Internet protocol-based technologies to provide superior services in the most cost-effective manner,” noted Subramanian. “Service providers are also slowly expanding their portfolio to other non-voice, back-office operations such as knowledge process outsourcing, financial and accounting outsourcing, and human resources outsourcing to provide end-to-end support.”