Despite being a $100 million global industry, call centre outsourcing is closely connected to India. While this is partly because it is, despite stiff competition from other nations, a dominant centre of call centres, but also because the modern industry was born there. India showed, for the first time, that the offshore call centre model was not just technically viable but also made financial sense for businesses.
The first call centres were in-house operations, with multinational financial institutions establishing their own operations to handle customer services for the region. These were, by modern standards, rudimentary affairs. While telecommunications made it possible to connect calls, the IT infrastructure was far more limited than today, limiting what call agents could do. However, even with the limitations, the savings realised by the lower labour costs created a model that others wanted to emulate.
The creation of the first third-party providers started with the experience gained by people working at the in-house centres, which made it possible for many more businesses to outsource their call centres. A company no longer needed the resources to manage its own offshore centre to benefit from its advantages.
This democratisation of call centres came alongside — and perhaps even stimulated — increasingly demanding customers. With businesses looking to find ways to meet the demands of their customers, using call centre providers became an obvious, cost-effective choice. As the birthplace of the modern call centre, India was a major beneficiary of this. But the global market has grown enormously and now supports a series of outsourcing centres serving a $100 million-a-year, and growing, industry.
As well as increasing choice for businesses, it has meant that different areas are starting to develop different offers. Call centres in the Philippines are one of India’s main competitors. They have now become the leading choice for call centres because of the high English fluency among Filipinos, making them excellent for customer service roles. On the other hand, India is increasingly developing a focus on IT support.
The growth of the call centre industry has been staggering and shows few signs of slowing. Some even predict that the pandemic will have accelerated trends, with consumers becoming ever more demanding, and suggest that the market for call centre companies will be up to five times bigger by 2027. And while those estimates may prove high, the consensus is that the call centre outsourcing market will continue to experience strong growth for the next few years.
Exactly what shape that growth will take remains to be seen. The call centre sector has invested heavily in things like AI and is increasingly using the insights from the data it collects to refine and improve the services they offer, which may transform the way call centres operate. The only thing that can be said for sure is that businesses and their customers will be the ones that benefit from lower costs and better services.