The increasing compliance issues in 2011 has seen its affects on different vertical markets with the end of doorstep selling in energy, the mis-selling of financial cover products in the home services marketplace, and call abandonment rules being broken as companies choose cost over quality.
The contact center industry this year, whether internal or external to an organisation will become more of a strategic asset to companies, as they struggle to balance the demands of compliance issues, increasing customer service needs and pressure to increase their customer base and revenues. Outsourcing will no longer always be a least cost decision, but be more of a strategic cost avoidance decision to protect company assets, reputation and ultimately share price. Companies will increasingly turn to outsourced partners with expertise in keeping them up to date and maintaining compliance systems with the fast moving regulatory changes, rather than carry the risk themselves. The compliance in outsourcing is no longer an issue of mere indirect cost, but has become a differentiator between those who have built their operations on a solid compliance base and those who have not.
Outsourcers who extend their compliance frameworks and systems to non-regulated campaigns are in a stronger position, however smaller outsourcers who are unable to deliver a compliant environment at a competitive cost will struggle to compete.
We have seen a great deal of change in the dynamics of the outsource market in 2011 with consolidation at the top of the market and smaller players struggling to maintain operation through recession at the bottom. This year we have seen consolidation in Tier one of the outsource market, and the large public sector BPO organisations acquiring virtual contact center outsourcers of scale. The public sector cuts by government this year have prompted these BPO’s who already have large scale public sector contracts to quickly acquire contact center resources to fill the gaps created as local government start to downsize.
Smaller players in the market have been affected this year by compliance issues and clients reacting to other commercial pressures, and when an outsourcer only has its business spread across a small number of clients this can have a devastating effect. So what does 2012 hold for the changing outsource market? Could we see the new ‘Super-BPO’s’ start to close their doors to new clients as they focus on the large and lucrative public sector contracts? For clients who still need to build their customer bases and generate significantly more revenue from their existing customers, they will start to look for partners with a solid reputation who can offer niche services that are scalable. This actually creates an opportunity for small and mid-size outsourcer who has solid compliance systems and technology platforms, and can provide that scalability.
We will see the rebirth of the niche outsource provider, for example we are one of few who specialise in proactive contact despite many predictions of the death of the outbound call.