Offshoring Threatened by Automated Call Centers

Automated self-service call center technologies are set to provide competition to low-cost Indian offshore agents as they offer more cost savings than their human counterparts, global research firm Datamonitor has said.

As companies look to reduce costs and improve customer service, the Datamonitor report cites savings of 25 to 35 per cent by moving a US call centre to India. However, the same service can be done by self-service technologies for 15 to 25 per cent of the cost of a call handled by an agent in India, Datamonitor said in two reports on “Voice Business in Regional Perspective”.

Speech automation, which uses software to decode human speech and eliminates the need to handle an enquiry manually, can deliver significant savings over offshoring where 95 per cent of the communication occurs over the phone.

“The popular offshore call centre markets, such as India and the Philippines, are rapidly maturing, resulting in increasing wages and higher turnover rates. This is likely to nullify labour arbitrage benefits and thus decrease the value proposition for businesses to open an offshore call centre,” Datamonitor Voice Business Analyst Daniel Hong said.

This has led to a sharpened focus among enterprises on improving and automating phone-based transactions through speech recognition technology, he said.

For this complete story, please visit Offshoring Threatened by Automated Call Centers.