HOME » OVERVIEW OF CUSTOMER CONTACT MARKET IN ASIA PACIFIC
Though the contact center market in Asia Pacific had been seeing robust growth over the last few years, the advent of the global economic recession, nevertheless, impacted spending by enterprises on customer care infrastructure & applications. Indeed, based on current estimates, the contact center applications market is expected to decline by nearly 10% to US$684.5 Million in 2009.
Looking back, as the global economic recession kicked in 2009, enterprises were forced to reduce costs amid limited growth opportunities leading to greater competitive pressures. Customer churn became a top-of-mind concern for enterprises and hence their contact centers focused on customer retention activities.
The offshore outsourcing business was also impacted and saw a slowdown in expansions and new site setups. However, the domestic outsourcing business in India and China continued to show positive growth. The Philippines market also continued to see some expansions and new setups.
Due to economic imperatives, contact centers had to focus on efficiency. Operational efficiency was a therefore a key priority for most contact centers. The mantra of “doing more with less” became even more accentuated because of the crisis. From a technology spending standpoint, expectation on pay back periods on technology investments fell and a “Spend-to-Save” mentality emerged in the marketplace.
However, optimization applications such as Workforce Management, Performance Management and Quality Monitoring saw good adoption in 2009. On-going adoption of IVRs as well as Contact Center Consolidation through IP migration projects was also seen.
Predictions for the Contact Center Market in 2010
As the economy begins to show signs of recovery, the contact center industry is expected to fare better in 2010. Whilst budget challenges will persist, economic recovery is expected to gather momentum & shift the focus back to customer acquisition. Aside from efficiency & effectiveness, driving customer satisfaction ratings will also assume greater importance. Overall spending on contact center applications will see steady growth in 2010; it is expected to grow by 9.5% to reach US$750 million by the end of the year. Some of the expected trends include:
- Contact Center Consolidation – Leveraging on an IP infrastructure to consolidate and virtualize multiple contact center sites into one virtual contact center will continue to gain traction in 2010. IP migration is expected to drive technology refresh in many markets in the region.
- Strong interest in Analytics – As contact centers aim to be more effective and yet be efficient, deploying analytics is rising on their priority list. Contact centers are showing strong interest in deploying analytics to improve operations as well as understand customers better to improve upsell/cross-sell hit rates. Pilots and adoption of speech analytics is also expected in 2010 in the Asia Pacific region.
- Self-Service Applications will continue to grow – As cost pressures will continue for sometime into 2010, interest in self-service applications such as IVRs and Voice portals will continue to be strong. Frost & Sullivan expects the IVR market to grow by 10.1 percent in 2010 in the Asia Pacific region.
- Hosted Contact Center – The Asia Pacific market has seen strong growth in the adoption of hosted contact centers. As many new contact centers are setup and seasonal expansions take place, the ability to have a flexible, scalable and opex-pricing based contact center technology model is highly attractive. Many service providers, both local as well as global SPs, are active in the market. Apart from service providers, outsourcers as well as cloud-based players such Salesforce.com are also active in the market. With more awareness of this offering, adoption of such hosted contact center services are expected to grow strongly in 2010.
- Social Media and Customer Service – With the increasing popularity of social media globally and in Asia Pacific, the need to incorporate social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as part of customer service is becoming increasingly important and relevant. The ability to listen to customer conversations and pro-actively reach out to customers makes social media channels a great avenue to differentiate and create great customer experiences. While the topic is new and there are process issues that contact centers would need to address, early adoption of social media customer engagement programs is expected in 2010.
