Disembodied voice threat to call centres

Companies in the US will spend more than $1 billion by 2008 on speech-enabled self-service technology (SESST) to do functions currently being done by call centres in India and some other nations.

A just-released report said US companies which spent $480 million in 2004 on SESST would spend $1.2 billion on the technology by 2008.

The good news was that businesses that already had offshore call centres could achieve greater cost savings by implementing SESST solutions. However, speech automation would be the alternative to offshore call centre agents. In other words, more work, but fewer jobs.

When compared to one handled in the domestic market, a call centre in an offshore location, like India, saved a US company approximately 25-35 per cent per transaction.

However, the same call serviced through speech automation would cost approximately 15-25 per cent of the cost of a call handled by an agent in India.

"The popular offshore call centre markets, such as India and the Philippines, are rapidly maturing resulting in increasing wages and higher turnover rates," said a Datamonitor analyst.

"This is likely to nullify labour arbitrage benefits and thus decrease the value proposition for businesses to open an offshore call centre. This has led to a sharpened focus among enterprises on improving and automating phone-based transactions through speech recognition technology," the analyst added.

"Companies that have offshore call centre operations could further reduce costs with speech, but companies that were looking to expand offshore may find more overall value by staying onshore and implementing a speech self-service solution," the analyst cautioned.

The reports was silent on whether the new technology would lead to call cantres in India shedding people.

The reports were released by the market analyst Datamonitor (DTM.L) from London, and titled 'Voice business in the Americas', and 'Voice business in EMEA & APAC'.

In 2008, the Caribbean and Latin American (CALA) voice business market would be worth $180 million, while the Europe, west Asia and Africa (EMEA) would top $1 billion and the Asia Pacific market $619 million.

Companies would do spend on SESST to improve customer service, reduce costs and increase top-line revenues.