What is the future for call centres?
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 foreca
