Call Center Technologies Are in Demand

A new study predicts that vendors of the five core component technologies used in call centers will see steady growth over the next five years. According to a report published this week by London-based market analysts Datamonitor, the global call center technology market will grow to a $5.5 billion market by 2007. The study expects growth from 2002 through 2007 will happen at 6 percent per year. Datamonitor claims the bulk of growth will occur as call centers add on to existing systems. The technologies to be added to the existing systems include automatic call distributors (ACDs); call recording, computer telephony integration (CTI), interactive voice response (IVR) and predictive dialing, the report states. Andreas Kolind, technology analyst at Datamonitor and author of the study, says that many technology markets have been hit hard by frozen IT budgets and tough economic conditions, but that spending among call centers will remain consistent because of the long-term growth in demand for call center services. "This is driven by customer contact centralized in one location, demand for customer relationship outsourcing and a need to match existing investments in applications with technology infrastructure," Kolind said in a prepared statement. Datamonitor predicts that the adoption of new technologies in Europe will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5 percent. That will outpace the larger and more mature North America market, where growth of just 3.8 percent is expected for the same period, the study says. Financial services will continue to lead the vertical pack in growth in North America, while the public sector will spur growth in the EMEA region from $36 million in 2002 to $66 million in 2007. Smaller call centers will be the fastest growing segment of the market. According to Datamonitor, by 2007 more than half of European call center vendor revenue will be derived from call centers with fewer than 100 agents. To serve that market, many vendors have introducing "lite" versions of their solutions and have changed pricing strategies to attract smaller call center projects. In addition, the trend for many large call center projects, those with 101 to 250 agents, will continue to be moving to off-shore outsourcing locations like India.