Hosted contact centres to rise |
Fran Foo, The Australian, 31 October 2007THE hosted contact centre industry in Australia is undergoing a massive boom that shows no signs of easing over the next two years, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan. In recent findings, Frost & Sullivan said last year's 20,000 hosted contact centre seats in Australia were expected to grow to 44,000 seats by 2009. In comparison, the Asia-Pacific region had 38,000 seats in 2006 and will register 113,000 seats by 2009. "Australia accounted for 52.6 percent of the total seats in the Asia-Pacific region in 2006 due to offerings by Telstra, Optus and Global Speech Networks (GSN)," a Frost & Sullivan Australia spokeswoman said. GSN is a privately held, Melbourne-based on-demand call and contact centre solution provider. According to managing director Nick Rodda, its customers come from a variety of verticals including logistics, telecommunications and financial services. "Virgin Mobile has been a customer for a while and we'll have an announcement with a large financial organisation coming up soon," Mr Rodda said. Incidentally, Optus and GSN have an indirect link via Oceania Customer Interaction Services (Ocis). Also Melbourne-based, Ocis runs an outsourced call centre business and counts Optus as a major client and GSN as its contact centre technology provider. The company uses a hosted IP-based virtual call centre solution developed by GSN. According to Ocis executive chairman Heath Lee, the company recently doubled the number of GSN hosted seats to cope with growing demands. He declined to reveal financial terms but said the additional seats were vital to its expansion plans. "We have two centres at the moment and are working on our third. Once that is in place we'll have capacity for around 400 seats in total," Mr Lee said. He said the flexibility from GSN's hosted model or pay-as-you-go made good business sense as it would otherwise be too expensive. "I can't talk about how much we pay per seat but I can say that if we installed a Genesys system on our own, for example, it would cost about $1.5 million for 100 seats," Mr Lee said. Apart from customer service and sales calls for Optus and other clients, Ocis also conducts market research on behalf of AC Nielsen. Frost & Sullivan Australia research manager Audrey William said the growth Ocis was experiencing was consistent with market trends. "Companies who need to quickly set up call services are able to procure technologies faster and in a more affordable manner from providers like Ocis," Ms William said. "Five to six years ago the hosted contact centre market here was slow. "But now companies have realised that if you need to quickly set up call services, say for a concert, you can get technologies like call routing, speech and interactive voice response easily and without burning a hole in the pocket," she said. Frost & Sullivan's Asia Pacific Hosted Contact Centre Market report will be released mid-November. |