Market Overview

“Increases in proactive customer care, collections, and alerts across a whole range of vertical markets drive the outbound calling market.”

Fuelled by expanding proactive customer care and greater third-party collections activity, the British outbound calling market is expected to grow at a robust rate in the next three to five years. Market participants report an increased emphasis on up selling and cross-selling.

Retention strategies are also becoming increasingly more important as businesses distinguish themselves by delivering excellent customer care. Enterprises looking to replace legacy dialing systems seek out fully integrated outbound/blended calling solutions that integrate seamlessly with existing telephony infrastructure and that offer multi-channel contact capabilities.

We believe that there is significantly greater market opportunity for recurring revenue and excellent margins in outsourced cold calling solutions. There appears to be high demand for automated outbound notifications, alerts, and information access.

"A trend that we observe among outbound centres in London and the South East, is for firms to use creative ways to enhance the customer experience through high-quality interactions," explains Terry Proxton marketing director of Pulse. "The type of customer ‘touch point’ is becoming more relevant with multimedia-capable solutions." Customer care, via live agent or agent-less notification, has taken on a more important focus. We think that targeted outbound calling and messaging is key to expanding company value and branding. This not only applies to existing customers but also to newly acquired ones. Businesses today want to concentrate on delighting customers and not worry about IT infrastructure and maintenance.

Integrated Solutions Key to Acquiring New Customers

Vendors have started promoting unified solutions that support both blended agent populations for inbound and outbound calling campaigns over stand-alone dialing products. "The customer interaction channel in a contact centre is no longer limited to voice, but extended to e-mail, chat, short messaging services, and more," further observes Terry. "The integration of inbound and outbound dialing is vital to successfully complete calls to the right agent at the right time, especially in the lucrative third-party collections segment." Small- and medium-sized businesses are increasingly moving to hosted outbound offerings due to their low upfront cost, fast implementation, and attractive ‘pay-as-you-use’ pricing model.