The Best Contact Center Outsourcing: The 2020 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Analyst firm Technavio expects the contact center outsourcing market to grow by $13.7 billion through 2024, progressing at a compound annual growth rate of 3 percent during that time.

While that growth is not as robust as many other portions of the overall CRM industry, contact center outsourcing does share a growing focus on reducing operating costs, increasing use of automation, and a greater reliance on analytics and cloud communications as key market drivers moving forward.

And while there is a huge push to bring contact centers back to on-shore and near-shore locations, several emerging countries, including the Philippines and several European and Latin American nations, are rising as preferred call center destinations.

Technavio also expects a high number of mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances among vendors to continue.

The Top Five

With roughly 100,000 employees at contact centers in 14 countries, Alorica, which in 2019 won the category under our old scoring system, last month announced plans to hire an additional 33,000 people around the world. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alorica mobilized 90 percent of its accounts and 70,000 employees to work from home. The company, which is based in Irvine, Calif., greatly expanded its footprint in 2019, planting its flag in both India and Latin America.

Concentrix, a subsidiary of SYNNEX, is the second largest global provider of customer engagement services, with approximately 240,000 employees across 275 locations in more than 40 countries. The company, which is based in Fremont, Calif., is the product of multiple mergers and acquisitions, including Convergys in late 2018. A One to Watch honoree for the past two years, Concentrix has advanced far in just the past year. Ian Jacobs, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, likes Concentrix for its “innovative approach to staffing,” an approach that includes Solv, its home-grown gig economy platform. Concentrix, he adds, ‘is a thought leader in handling variable volume, seasonality, and nascent service channels.”

Sitel Group, a perennial favorite among analysts, is on a tear this year. The company recently embarked on a partnership with Uniphore, a conversational service automation provider, to bring Uniphore’s automation and artificial intelligence to its customers around the globe. It is headquartered in Miami, and its more than 90,000 employees provide outsourced sales, technical support, customer service, and other business processes for large companies. Its people deliver more than 3.5 million customer experiences every day for more than 400 clients around the world.

TTEC Holdings, also among the leaders for the past few years, in early August acquired VoiceFoundry, a provider of artificial intelligence and natural language automation, chatbots, computer telephony and CRM systems, enterprise integration, user experience design, analytics, omnichannel engagement, and workforce optimization. The acquisition also allowed TTEC to offer Amazon Web Services’ Connect contact center platform as part of its own Humanify Cloud CX platform. The move also brought more than 50 blue-chip companies to TTEC’s customer base. The company, which is based in Englewood, Colo., has about 50,000 employees at 85 facilities in 24 countries. “TTEC has a differentiated approach to supporting services, including mature CX consulting, innovative learning and training solutions, technology integration, and a broad palette of analytics, all of which makes it a partner for much more than just labor arbitrage and seasonal staffing,” Jacobs says.

Teleperformance, by far the industry’s largest service provider, is based in Paris and employs more than 331,000 employees in 80 countries. A previous category winner, Teleperformance supports billions of customer connections every year in more than 265 languages and 170 markets. But it is expanding quickly to other areas. “Teleperformance has aggressively pushed beyond its agent services roots into new revenue streams that remain tightly aligned with customer experience, such as content moderation, data analytics, and healthcare services,” Jacobs says.