As reported in December 2010, just before the year of 2010 comes to an end, the Asian-country Philippines has already exceeded its Indian competitors when it comes to the area of contact center outsourcing. India usually comes to mind when outsourcing is being discussed, especially because of the cheap costs the Indian outsourcing firms offer their clients. However, this is no longer the case as the Philippines is now regarded as the top destination for call center outsourcing.

A contact center may sound easy to run: you set up a center, you hire the best people available in the market to conduct customer support, and you give them the best equipment available to you.  Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not really. There are companies that concentrate solely on the call center business for a reason. Running a contact center requires constant attention including managing employees.  Case in point, attrition rates are a major concern for many companies with contact centers.  And that is just one area of the business.

When companies found that they could successfully shift operations of call center services to call center outsourcing provider’s years ago, many jumped at the chance, fueling an outsourcing boom to places such as the Philippines and India.  Now however, some companies are choosing to go with an in-house model for call center operations, moving away from the outsourcing trend.

Contact center outsourcing continues on its path of growth with the entry of 2011.  Considering that the Philippines currently ranks first in terms of revenues in the call center outsourcing space according to forecasts by the Everest Group, the country has proven that it is well on its way in further improving its lot in the industry with numerous companies betting on the country for expansion opportunities this 2011.

With the rapid evolution of technology and communication, fields such as the outsourcing industry have had to adapt to changing technologies. Outsourcing companies have had to innovate as well as invest in newer and better solutions, in order to keep up with our changing world. But one of outsourcing’s sectors most influenced by the evolution of technology, and perhaps one that has also been most challenged by it, is contact center outsourcing. Given that the way people communicate has rapidly evolved from snail mail, to email to texting to tweets, it is unsurprising that companies are having a hard time to adapt, especially considering that give or take forty years ago, there was no email, twenty years ago, there was no texting and five years ago, there was no Twitter.

Call center services are a mainstay in the outsourcing industry, thus it is hardly surprising that when broadcasting network, NBC, released the pilot for Outsourced, the show that it terms, ‘at once reverent and irreverent’, it featured the call center setting with the premise of the story being that the US order taking call center was moved offshore into India.  But while the plot of the show Outsourced is purely fiction, latest news among call center outsourcing companies do remind us that, no matter how loosely, Outsourced is still based on real life.

New industries are emerging in the CRM outsourcing space.  This is according to independent consulting research and analysis firm, Ovum.  The new report, released on the 12th of October, advised that healthcare, government and utilities are slated to have the strongest growth in customer relationship management (CRM) for 2011, in terms of demand.