Competitive Differentiation - a Top Priority for Contact Centers

Business Wire, June 26, 2008

Industry Thought Leaders from the Region Elucidate on the Evolving Trends in Customer Service at the 3rd Annual Frost & Sullivan Customer Contact Asia Pacific Summit

MANILA, Philippines -- Asia Pacific is one of the fastest growth regions in the world for contact centers. Booming economies of India and China continue to see a surge in new contact center setups across different sectors. Together the high-growth markets, namely, India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia contributed over 35.9 percent of the total market seats in 2007 and this is expected to increase to 53.3 percent of the total market seats by 2013.

Frost & Sullivan's exclusive executive MindXchange summit, the 3rd Annual Customer Contact Asia Pacific Summit, which starts today, highlights on the people, processes and technology that deliver customer satisfaction and excellence in the contact center industry.

Shivanu Shukla, industry manager at Frost & Sullivan comments, "The increasing importance on customer service placed by enterprises, together with the rising competition, impact of the internet, changing customer demographics and the rapidly changing customer communications landscape has made enterprises rethink their customer service strategies.

This has caused a shift in priorities of contact centers from mere cost-effectiveness and revenue-optimisation to competitive differentiation," adds Shukla.

According to Frost & Sullivan research, Asia Pacific region will continue to witness strong growth in coming years. In 2007, the number of contact center seats in Asia pacific were over 1.55 million seats and this is expected to reach about 3.06 million seats by 2016 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4 percent.

Banking financial services and insurance (BFSI) and telecom & IT enterprises are leading adopters of contact centers in the region. Owing to their vast customer base and need for differentiated service due to strong competition, these sectors are expected to be one of the leading contributors to the contact center market by 2013, growing at a CAGR of 8.5 percent and 10.1 percent respectively in the 2006-2016 period.

The two-day executive MindXchange program, has several interesting topics including next-generation contact centers, the art of customer service differentiation, customer service in the internet world, hosted contact center, a case study on the growth story of Philippines BPO industry, evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center and many more.

Besides the panel discussions and thought-leader's presentations, the summit has four think-tank sessions. Topics include: defining the new set of customer expectations, handing top industry challenges, optimum use of technology for call centers and extending the contact center into the enterprise. Think-tank is an innovative forum where the participants can brain-storm on key challenges and concerns faced by them with the thought-leader.

The contact center industry in Asia Pacific continues to grow strongly on the back of offshoring and outsourcing activities; however, there has also been a surge in domestic demand from the fast growing Asian economies which is proving to be the next driver for growth.

The summit features prominent industry speakers from AIG Consumer group, Aspect Global Services, Avaya, Business Processing Association of Philippines, Consilium Software Inc, Hong Kong Contact Centre Association, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC)of Malaysia, NICE Systems, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, PacNet, IBM Daksh, TeleTech, WinSource along with Frost & Sullivan senior industry analysts.

The summit is supported by MDeC, Avaya, Aspect, Nice, Consilium and Plantronics. Regional associations endorsing the summit are the Business Processing Association Philippines (BPAP), Hong Kong Call Center Association (HKCCA), and Indonesia Call Center Association, (ICCA). Business World is the newspaper partner while, Computerworld Philippines, Enterprise Innovation, PC Magazine, Enterprise and BPO Times are the official media partners for the summit.

For more information, please visit www.frost-ccap.com.

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