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Call centre development

Interest in home-based customer service agents is rising.  UK companies, public sector bodies and call centre outsourcers are all taking a hard look at the economics and business models of using home-based customer service and support agents. This is the observation of Jon Snow, principal analyst at market information specialist Call Centre Clinic,

"We started having regular conversations about homeshoring opportunities with corporates and outsourcers at the back-end of 2008,...but the volume of interest has grown in the last quarter, as has the number of press stories on the subject."  28 May 2009

Market size and characteristics

Over the past four years, the UK call centre industry has experienced growth of between 3% and 6% each year (Mintel, April 2009).

There have been a number of driving forces shaping the contact centre industry in recent years. 

  • Heightened customer dissatisfaction with offshore call centres has resulted in an increasing number of companies returning to UK centres.  Mintel (April 2009) found that those companies who have moved back to the UK have seen a marked increase in customer satisfaction.
  • Traditional marketing channels are becoming increasingly fragmented and customer expectations and knowledge have increased.  Businesses are struggling to meet the right people with the right method.  UK-based call centres are now seen as a direct, more cost effective route to the customer.
  • Technological advances and economies of scale have resulted in market growth and productivity gains and are seen as increasingly more cost-effective option by many UK companies.
  • Mintel (April 2009) found that the pace of software development has added a perceived risk to organisations running in-house operations due to added costs of keeping up with technology.  Outsourced suppliers are able to offer up-to-date systems and protocols and are seen as a much less risky proposition.
  • Deregulation of the UK telephone sector is more advanced than in many other companies and has resulted in lowered call costs.
  • The UK labour market has historically been more flexible than its’ European counterparts and is able to provide flexible and often more highly qualified workers (due to investment in higher education).
  • The concept of call centres is older in the UK than in the rest of Europe and some other countries and has thus had more time to develop.  Additionally, a long term cultural shift in the UK has occurred, which has resulted in greater acceptance of the phone as a sales platform.

"Homeshoring"

One major trend to appear in the UK call centre industry is that of “homeshoring”, where an employee works from home and acts as an integrated part of an organisation’s contact centre.

Mintel (April 2009) suggests that the type of person that homeshoring attracts is different.

“the point of homeshoring is to enable expert staff who wouldn’t normally work in a call centre, to provide their expertise in a call centre capacity. This more flexible, inclusive approach to the service advisor position is enabled by increasingly cost-effective, high-performance broadband connectivity, and the emergence of new standards for converged voice, video and data communication such as Session Initiation Protocol”

Homeshoring is expected to grow significantly.  BT Global Service identities five main drivers for this growth.

  • Lower recruitment, training and staff retention costs.
  • Access to more specialised staff from a wider geographical location.
  • Customer dissatisfaction with offshore call centres.
  • Reduced costs and increased reliability of home broadband services.
  • The increased focus and heightened level of importance placed on green issues and organisational carbon footprint reductions.

The Changing Shape of the Call Centre Industry

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