IP Contact Centers in North America – an Overview
-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer
Concerned over the recent spate of outsourcing contact center operations to India and offshore locations? Don’t be, because, according to this study on the North American IP contact center market from Research and Markets, IP-based contact centers are entering a boom period. A few pertinent points from the report:
- Market-wide revenue has crossed 50 percent for the past few years, and this quick growth is expected to continue for at least the next two years.
- The adoption of IP telephony is slower at smaller contact centers than at their larger counterparts.
- More than 50 percent of contact center seat sales in North America are expected to be IP-based by 2008.
- The small-mid sector holds the greatest potential for the future, following the saturation of the large contact center market.
- The migration to IP is driven by the fact that consolidation of infrastructure for distributed enterprises and the associated consolidation for applications like quality monitoring, CRM, and interactive voice response (IVRs) result in a simplified architecture that supports changes and upgrades and also provides a centralized administrative view of all customer contacts.
- IP telephony also facilitates integration between IVRs and Web self service applications.
- IP environments are easy to maintain, operational costs are less, agents are more efficient, and customer experiences are improved.
- The success rate of migration depends on vendors who should promise and deliver effective distribution and channels strategies, and trouble-free migration paths that tap into the least number of customer IT resources.