Demand for CX services is disrupting the Contact Center Outsourcing market, pitting traditional models based on labor arbitrage and scale with digital-first strategies.

Customer experience (CX) is king, dominating the strategic focus of a growing number of enterprises seeking to build a loyal customer base. These enterprises are taking a digital-first approach, aggressively shopping for service providers with next-generation, digital capabilities that can help them gain in-depth customer understanding, deliver personalized CX and establish highly qualified talent pools for managing CX. According to new research from Everest Group, digital CX, which currently represents 4-6 percent of the overall contact center outsourcing (CCO) market, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20-25 percent for the next five years.

“Traditional CCO approaches are rapidly evolving to those focused on delivering customer experience services,” said Skand Bhargava, practice director of Business Process Services at Everest Group. “In fact, the digital outsourcing drivers for enterprises—such as CX consulting, omnichannel platforms and digital capabilities such as automation and analytics solutions—are increasingly becoming more important than in the past. Enterprise buyers expect their service providers to be customer-centric and to provide innovative solutions that can help them meet and exceed the expectations of digital-native customers.”

These findings and more are discussed in “Contact Center Outsourcing Annual Report 2018 – Transforming Customer Experience Through a Digital-First Approach.” This report provides an overview of the CCO market, evolving buyer expectations, market size, adoption trends, key solution characteristics, and the outlook for 2018-2019.

Other key findings:

• The global contact center spend stands at US$320-350 billion, of which third-party outsourcing accounts for approximately 26 percent. The global CCO market grew at approximately 4 percent in 2017 to reach US$81-83 billion, driven by the growing interest among new buyers for outsourcing and the emerging growth avenues for service providers around consulting and digital CX solutions. The CCO market is expected to grow further at a rate of 4-5 percent to reach US$91-93 billion by 2020.
• The adoption of chat and social media has increased significantly over the past two years, compared to email and voice; chat has become the most preferred channel among millennials.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) and rule-based chatbots are increasingly adopted across multiple use cases in contact centers to solve key business problems such as longer average handle time (AHT), average waiting times, and navigating through multiple systems and applications. Artificial intelligence (AI) is largely leveraged to unlock customer insights, predict customer actions, and make personalized recommendations.
• The operational analytics solutions such as desktop analytics and agent performance analytics have witnessed high adoption in contact centers. The adoption of business analytics solutions that include customer analytics, sentiment analytics, and Voice of Customer Analytics (VoCA) is expected to increase over the next few years.
• The delivery model for customer service management (CXM) services is evolving with a balanced mix of onshore, offshore, and nearshore agents, augmented with the Work-at-Home Agent (WAHA) model and next-generation technology solutions. The WAHA model continues to grow in CXM services, with around 93 percent of the total WAHA agents based out of the United States.