What is the update on the growth of the Asian contact-center industry?
It is growing at an average of 22 percent, as measured by seat size. Also, our recent research reveals that 63 percent of the Asian call-center managers find it “extremely difficult” to recruit agents. And the top three challenges are: Shortage of candidates with the right skill set; shortage of candidates (skilled or not) in the marketplace; and contact-center industry paying uncompetitive salaries compared to other industries. Though growth is seen, the Asian contact-center industry is now in a “recruitment crisis.”
 
What can be done to reduce the existing gap between the demand and the supply of skilled workforce across the industry? 
The growth of the industry and the demand for agents outweigh the current supply. One such evidence of this gap can be seen in Australia. The contact-center industry in Australia has a capacity of about 180,000 people against a population of only 20 million. Australian contact-center managers have indicated that the industry requires an additional 27,000 agents to be recruited by the end of this year. Seventy percent of these contact-center managers say that they will have extreme difficulty in recruiting this number.

Dr. Catriona Wallace Director, callcentres.net

“The time has come to replace contact-center agents with technology.” What’s your take on it? 
About 10 years ago I wrote an academic paper titled, The Sacrificial HR Strategy in Call Centres, which was a very controversial view of how organizations sacrifice the emotions and well being of front-line workers for business outcomes. Essentially, they hire them, make them work hard on the frontline, burn them out completely and remain profitable as an organization even when the agents leave. Although the industry has greatly improved in the last 10 years, the retention of employees is still a concern. Technology can offer some relief on  this. In particular, self-service technologies such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), speech recognition and Web chat can allow a contact center to increase capacity but not head count and also allow more service choice for clients. Be it the young consumers (16 to 30 year olds) or the baby boomers (45 to 62 year olds), they will be happier to interact with technology rather than hang on the phone waiting to talk to an agent.
So, yes, the time has come to increase the level of self-service technologies in contact centers to take the pressure off the HR-management challenges.

Philippines, India and the LatAm countries are first to flash through our mind when we talk about call-center hubs, though a lot is happening in Singapore, China and Malaysia as well. Why?
There is a lot happening in the South American markets, particularly with regard to LatAm countries servicing the U.S. market. The Philippines, with 105,000 seats is growing at 32 percent per annum in size and positioning exceptionally well in servicing the American outsourced market. The Filipinos have competed well on having a very good service culture, an American accent and are also quite advanced with contact-center technologies. The Philippines government is also very supportive of the contact-center and outsourcing industry.

Malaysia is a potential outsourcing destination, but the wages are quite high compared to India or the Philippines. It receives a major chuck of work from Singapore and Australia. In order to promote destinations like Singapore, China and Malaysia, industries need to continue emphasizing on service culture, security, cost savings and more. Also attention needs to be drawn toward the ability of agents to generate revenue, that is, cross- sell and up-sell. One of the interesting factors noticed of late is the rise of China in this industry. Though it has language barriers, China is definitely getting aggressive in establishing its contact-center industry!

What does the future have in store for global contact centers?
The future should be characterized by a movement of different types of contact-center work to destinations where there is a “comparative advantage.” That is, the routine, more transactional work will move offshore to destinations where it can be handled in large volumes, efficiently. The more complex, relationship-based customer interactions are likely to remain onshore. We will see much greater use of self-service technologies and the contact-center industry being the primary source of revenue generation for organizations. From an HR perspective, the contact-center industry will need to continue to address issues of agent attrition, remuneration, career roadmap and flexible work conditions.