US call centre jobs worst hit by offshore outsourcing

The US share of outsourced call centre jobs will drop 12 per cent to a quarter of the global market over the next three years as companies are increasingly forced to move the work to cheaper overseas locations or use automation, according to a new report by analyst Datamonitor.

The US had 37 per cent of the world's outsourced call centre positions in 2004 but the Datamonitor report, Contact Centre Outsourcing in the US predicts that global market share will shrink to 25 per cent by 2008, from 315,000 jobs to 291,000.

Outbound telemarketing positions will be worst hit, accounting for 90 per cent of the US call centre jobs lost, mainly due to the introduction of the 'Do Not Call' registry and the higher revenues available from inbound call centre work.

Narrow profit margins are increasingly forcing outsourcers to move call centre work from the US to cheaper locations such as Canada, India and the Philippines, or to automate the service altogether where viable. This will lead to a corresponding increase in the number of outsourced call centre positions in offshore locations such as India.

Ri Pierce-Grove, associate analyst at Datamonitor, said call centre outsourcers are also combating this threat to revenues by reinventing themselves and extending into the more lucrative business process outsourcing market.

He said in the report: "The boundaries between US-based contact centre providers and other business process outsourcers are dissolving, and firms are invading each others' territories. There have been at least eight publicly announced acquisitions since 2003, and Datamonitor expects this trend to continue."

The report follows statistics earlier this month showing that UK IT and call centre jobs have not been hit by offshore outsourcing. That report by the Office for National Statistics showed employment growth in call centre positions has been three times that of overall employment growth since 2001, and that redundancy levels have also fallen consistently.