For many years, even decades, call centres have been the primary recipient of response to consumer advertising campaigns. Throughout the 1990’s call centres were able to grow on the back of a strong growth in response-seeking advertising and marketing. In the last decades of the last millennium there was significant investment in call centres, technology and people.

However, as we entered the new millennium, the internet emerged as an alternative recipient of response. Now, as broadband penetration has increased to critical mass, online interactivity has become the norm and many companies are driving huge volumes of response to the internet. These developments open up a debate about the future of call centres with their significant costs in terms of buildings, communications, technology and people. Marketers are asking: What is the future of the call centre?

I found some interesting research on this topic from Forrester. Forrester asked 176 large US firms (turnover of $500m+) to forecast how the saw the way they interact with customers changing over the next two years.

The big gainers are web and email, whilst the big loser is call centres. 96% predicted a significant increase in the use of the web and 80% saw a significant increase in the use of email. Virtually no companies saw a reduction in these online interaction channels. At the other end of the spectrum 28% saw either a small or significant reduction in the use of call centres whilst only 17% saw significant growth prospects. Phone self service was tabled for a 69% increase suggesting that whilst these firms recognise that there are many consumers who still want to interact by phone, they are not necessarily prepared to pay for that to be a live conversation.

It looks as through live call centres are in for a tough time; they’ve lost their historical monopoly on non-retail interaction with the consumer. Companies are going to see very tempting cost savings in online interaction so they’re likely to encourage and invest in it. I think they’ll always be a role for live call centres, though much reduced and focused into the type of high value conversations that justify their relatively high costs. Live conversations are likely to be increasingly reserved for high value products, high value relationships and high value customers.

Forrester