The call centre industry in the UK continues to expand, despite the high-profile exodus of many large contact centre operations to low-wage locations overseas. However, employment has grown more slowly than if outsourcing overseas had not become such a big feature of communications. Greater productivity per employee, facilitated by workforce planning software, automated voice recognition, improved call distribution systems and other technological enhancements that raise output have also tempered the rise in call centre jobs. Contact centres for the public sector — central and local government, police, health, fire and ambulance services, and so on — were probably the major trend of 2005.
More than three-quarters of the contract value of outsourced call/contact centre services is for outbound calling — but unsolicited outbound sales calling to UK customers is in terminal decline. Permission marketing is taking its place.
Effective response to callers on incoming lines is so important to brand values that many companies do not risk outsourcing them, even within the UK. For call centre employees in India and other Asian countries, provision of peak-hours services to the US and Western Europe means they have to work anti-social hours. Staff turnover that often exceeds 40% a year damages customer service, because few staff stay long enough to acquire detailed knowledge about the organisation they are paid to represent. Alternative locations with attractions for contact centre operators include the new EU states in Eastern Europe. South Africa, with a large number of English speakers, is also a fast-growing location for contact centres. The negative aspects of outsourcing include the potential for theft, such as the selling of personal information about customers.
Key Note's surveys since 2000 indicate rising customer dissatisfaction with call centres, and in 2005 the increase in dissatisfaction appeared very steep indeed. People dislike automated answering systems, and an overwhelming majority claimed to have wasted time navigating option menus. More than eight in every ten respondents to Key Note's 2005 survey said they would opt for speaking to a real person instead of dealing with an automated system; furthermore, almost nine respondents in ten preferred to speak to staff in a local office. More than eight in ten said that call centres made organisations too remote from their customers, and almost three in every four respondents thought that call centres benefited organisations more than they benefited customers. More than three in four agreed than call centres could reduce customer loyalty. Almost three respondents in four criticised telephone sales staff for being too persistent and putting them under pressure. Among a range of other issues covered by the survey were customers' ability to understand call centre staff, attitudes towards the practice of foreign call centre agents assuming false UK identities, and perceptions of improvement or deterioration in the helpfulness of call centre staff in the past year.
The coming enforced move away from an oil-based economy is likely to result in relocalisation of economic activity, and lifestyles with less commuting, fewer long-distance holidays and more remote shopping, which would create more demand for contact centres. The technological context in which contact centres will need to work includes voice-data convergence, service-oriented architecture, real-time infrastructure, open-source software and global sourcing. Virtual contact centre technology is speeding the development of dispersed, networked centres.
The successful businesses that operate contact centres in the UK are getting larger, and the gap between the big and the rest is widening. By 2010, the number of independent contact centre businesses should have fallen substantially. Companies that outsource contact centre operations, or run their own, are starting to look beyond costs to the enhancement of brand values. The contact centre sector continues to suffer downward pressures on margins. In the future, businesses that have outsourced to low-wage economies will be forced to reassess the effectiveness of the economic models they have adopted, because long supply chains will become increasingly uneconomic. After globalisation will come a phase of relocalisation, to keep supply chains as short as possible.
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