Latin America Call Centers Slow on VoIP Uptake

Latin America’s contact centers have proved “slow to adopt IP telephony,” according to research by US call center software provider Genesys (News - Alert).

Industry journal BNAmericas reports that research shows that only 15 percent of Latin American respondents had adopted IP technology, compared to 25 percent in the Asia Pacific region and 19 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the statement said.

Globally 60 percent of interviewees plan to migrate to IP telephony within a year, BNAmericas says, “whilst 82 percent will organize the change within two years, according to the research. In the transition period, the majority of technology managers will adopt hybrid systems, the statement said.”

“We hope for strong growth in [IP telephony] by the year-end,” said Laurent Delache, director of operations at Genesys’ Brazilian unit.

The research polled 500 contact center technology managers in 20 sectors globally.

One of the last comprehensive surveys of the Latin America call center market, “Call Center Outsourcing in Latin America and the Caribbean to 2008,” was published by Datamonitor in 2004. It found that 12,900 customer service positions were outsourced from the United States and Europe into Latin America at that time.

To put this into perspective, there are 2.86 million call center agent positions in the United States.

By 2008 Datamonitor expects 25,100 APs – still just 0.9 percent of the US AP total – to be outsourced from the United States to Latin America.

According to Datamonitor, the Latin American call center market is the fastest growing region in the world, spearheaded by Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. At the time of the study it had over 336,000 agent positions in 5,100 call centers.

Datamonitor expects that a total of 23,000 offshore call center APs will be outsourced from the US and Europe to Mexico and Argentina by 2008. Both destinations are proving to be popular nearshore and offshore components to an outsourcing strategy for clients with significant amounts of bilingual English and Spanish calling.

Most calling from Europe originates in Spain and Portugal although there is a small fraction from Germany and Italy. The lion’s share of offshore calling in Mexico is from the US, primarily “press 2 for Spanish service.”

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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