Telephone Call Centers

Telephone Call Centers

Brief Excerpt from Industry Overview Chapter:

Companies in this industry operate telephone call centers that provide telemarketing, customer care, and other outsourced business services on a contract basis. Major companies include Alorica, Conduent, Concentrix, FoundEver, and TeleTech (all based in the US), as well as Atento (Spain), Teleperformance (France), and Transcom Worldwide (Luxembourg).

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Demand is largely driven by consumer spending and business activity. The profitability of individual companies depends on efficiency of operations. Big companies have the scale to provide services to large corporate customers. Small companies can compete successfully for small and mid-sized customers, because there are few economies of scale. The US industry is concentrated: the top 50 companies account for about 50% of revenue.

PRODUCTS, OPERATIONS & TECHNOLOGY

Major services are telemarketing and call support services, which accounts for about 85% of the industry revenue. This is followed by telephone answering and messaging at about 20% with other services including the retail sales of goods, fundraising organization services, and packaging and labeling services. Call center operations are typically a function of business process outsourcing (BPO) services, which include the contracting of back office tasks (such as billing or purchasing) or front office, customer-related tasks (such as marketing or tech support).