The future of call centres
Published: 17 Feb 2003 12:40 GMT
Mitial Research recently produced a report which contains some interesting, and at the same time pessimistic, forecasts about the future of the call centre industry in the UK.
It is suggested a variety of factors will contribute to a substantial decline in UK call centres over the next two years. Critical amongst them are over capacity, economic slowdown and the maturing of the Internet as a means of customer communication, as well as more competitively priced call centres in Asia.
Call centres have primarily been sited in UK regions where there was high unemployment, arising from the decline in traditional manufacturing and production businesses. Many were assisted in their establishment by regional funding grants. What they did was provide needed but normally poorly paid jobs in the less prosperous areas of the UK.
About 300,000 people are employed in call centres in the UK. They provide flexible part-time work for students and mothers. It is predicted the number employed will fall to somewhere in the region of 220,000 by the end of 2004. Call centre work is rapidly segmenting into low value work and high value services.
It is the lower value work that is being migrated to the internet or being moved to India. There, graduate calibre recruits can be attracted at salaries which are substantially below those of less educated UK-based call centre workers.
Some of the banks, such as HSBC, have substantial service centres. It is likely that the number of larger call centres, providing basic call centre services, will diminish. Although the largest number of sites are located in London and the South, the largest fall in call centres in percentage terms is forecast to come from the North-East, Wales and the Midlands.
The higher value service work provided through call centres remains in the UK, and at smaller call centres. Organisations would like to relocate this type of work to lower cost environments but there is a concern that this may result in lost business, because the customers "may feel uncomfortable".
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