According to a new Research and Markets report, the demand for both inbound and outbound contact centers, and by extension the demand for inbound contact routing (ICR) and dialing solutions, is expected to slowly decline in North America. The report forecasts that the total number of contact center seats will shrink from 4.1 million in 2012 to 4 million by 2017.
The company's research also found that customers prefer to initiate contact with customer service agents rather than having agents contacting them. In turn, the inbound contact center has been built around the automatic call distributor (ACD), which routes most contacts to contact center agents.
Despite the gloomy outlook, there are opportunities for vendors in this mature market. For example, consider hosted solutions. Hosted delivery allows companies to cut costs by buying only the applications and capacity they need, an attractive on-demand value proposition. Hosting also provides companies with business continuity that allows them to support their customer contact operations when disasters strike.