Telephone Call Centers
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).
Even with the COVID-19 pandemic, the global call center revenue is estimated to reach $164.7 billion in 2022, according to Colliers. By 2027, it is expected that the global call center revenue will reach more than $490 billion by 2027, according to Statista. Growth markets for the industry include India, the US, Philippines, Brazil, Ukraine, Poland, and Malaysia, according to Global Call Forwarding.
The US telephone call center industry includes about 5,300 establishments (single-location companies and units of multi-location companies) with combined annual revenue of about $22 billion.
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.
Companies in the industry may lose business to potential customers that choose to conduct call center operations in house; they may also compete with business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT services companies. The industry has been sharply affected in recent years by regulatory controls on telemarketing practices and strong competition from offshore operators, though geopolitical uncertainty presents an opportunity for reshoring to the US.
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
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