Traditional outsourcers will continue to be a mainstay of the industry. Although carriers are superbly positioned to provide outsourcing services, this business component is not their main focus, and it is unlikely that carriers will ever replace outsourcer organizations that make outsourcing their core business and therefore concentrate on providing call center services to their customers. Further evidence of this is that opportunities for outsourcing have been available for some years, yet only recently have carriers discovered the market for enhanced services, and they do not have a good track record of developing products from technologies. Traditional outsourcers will undoubtedly retain the competitive advantage.
Carriers tend to be slow to enter new markets and develop new products. This appears to be a characteristic of the telco marketplace and is probably a relic left over from the monopoly positions they held for many years in the communications industry. No need to hurry, there is no competition anyway! Carriers are often referred to as "Ma Bells," an oblique reference to the fact that they have a tendency to "mother" their services and products far too long before introducing them. As a result, they are often left behind by competitors who are not encumbered by the traditions of the monopolies once held by the telcos.
In the past, outsourcers were considered to be primarily outbound entities, providing a range of telemarketing services to organizations that did not have their own telemarketing facilities or that needed some additional resources to run a marketing campaign or customer survey. From this basic entree into the call center market, outsourcing services have evolved and become much broader and more sophisticated. In fact, outsourcing services now offered go well beyond the original concept of an outsourcing organization. Back-office functions are now offered by outsourcers, and their range of services may include inbound and outbound call handling, customer tracking, quality assurance, fulfillment, data processing, and even help desk customer support—a considerable enhancement of their traditional services.
Customer support or, as it has become known in many industry sectors, the help desk, is one area that more and more companies are contracting to outside experts. This is especially true in such industry sectors as personal computers and home electronics, where there may be a high volume of customer support inquiries following purchases that the vendor is not staffed to handle. The advanced technologies that enable calls to be routed and tracked make the help desk function easier and more cost-effective. As postsales customer support becomes simultaneously more important and more expensive, companies are looking for lower-cost alternatives that don't force them to compromise on the quality and level of response.
Challenges and pressures
As noted previously, outsourcers have the same challenges and pressures to manage as in-house call centers. As a group, they have always been in the forefront of technological and operational change in the call center industry and will continue to be good indicators of where the business is going. Several emerging trends and technologies will change the way outsourcers do business in the next decade, and the following paragraphs provide some insight into these factors.
Over the next five years, it is unlikely that the outsourcing environment will change dramatically, despite changes in technology and the operating procedures that these changes will introduce. Although there are several trends pushing the call center in virtualized and various directions, the physical nature of today's centers—rooms full of people, talking into headsets, looking at screens—is unlikely to change in the immediate future.
Any changes in the outsourcing industry in the next few years will reflect changes in the rest of the call center industry—what happens within in-house call centers. The pressure to improve productivity and deliver more and better services directly to the end user will continue unabated and possibly be even more apparent, as customer demands increase and become an increasingly strong component of the competitive business environment. Organizations are continuously working to provide more "self-service" methods of interaction—letting customers interact with and search databases for answers to their own problems—for example, automated systems to transfer funds, travel-oriented services, and Internet front-end banking services that are integrated into those services, with back-end database tools. An evolving series of power technologies will continue to become available to call centers; some will be new, while others will be enhancements of existing technologies. For outsourcers, it will be important to stay ahead of the competition—to use these new technologies to improve efficiency and to differentiate their services from the competition—and to remain profitable businesses.
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