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Asia Pacific (APAC) has been a high growth region for the contact center industry. Even the recent economic downturn proved to be only a minor set-back to the industry with its the future growth potential remaining intact. In terms of total number of seats, the contact center industry in APAC which was at about 1.7 million seats in 2008, is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.5% and reach over 3 million seats by 2014. During the same period, the Contact Center Applications Market in APAC is expected to nearly double, from $665.4 million to $1.31 billion.
The Contact Center market in APAC can be segmented into 3 main categories – emerging, growth or mature markets. Key emerging markets include countries such as Vietnam (which is, in fact, the fastest growing market in APAC), Thailand & Indonesia whereas countries like Malaysia, Philippines, India & China can be categorized as growth markets. Mature markets include countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea & Singapore.
Based on Frost & Sullivan’s research, the emerging & growth markets are seeing good prospects on the back of rising domestic demand for customer care, increasing drive towards self-service, focus on improving quality of customer experience, &/or sustained growth in the outsourcing business from North America and Europe. Some of the other major trends in the Asia Pacific are:
- domestic demand offsetting any slowdown in off-shoring in larger markets such as India & China
- analytics seeing greater adoption in mature markets
- increase mid-market demand
- some adoption of speech recognition in Asian
Looking forward, as the economy begins to show signs of recovery; the contact center industry is expected to fare better. 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.
- 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.
Facilitated & chaired by senior industry analysts from Frost & Sullivan, the Customer Contact Summits in 2010 will bring together Senior Business Executives from around the region to discuss strategic, tactical and implementation issues facing Contact Center markets. It would feature an interactive up-to-date conference program (including a choice of concurrent sessions) designed to cover emerging industry developments as well as showcase best practices adopted by leading companies.
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