Automation and Work-at-Home Transforming the Customer Experience Outsourcing Services Market in Latin America and the Caribbean, Forecast to 2025

The customer experience outsourcing (CXO) services market was significantly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, especially when measuring revenue in US dollars. However, the negative impact was not as great as in other economic sectors, as a couple of positive trends were accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. Social distancing regulations across the region did not allow consumers to visit shopping malls and physical stores, thus leaving the remote connection as the only way to engage with brands. This situation not only generated significant growth opportunities for many CX and business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors, but also elevated the status of the CX service providers (CXSPs) in the economy. Moreover, as people spent more time isolated in their homes, they yearned from human connection and reach out more often to brands in order to speak with human agents.
     
Due to social distancing regulations and lockdowns starting on March 2020, providers were forced to abruptly transition to a work-at-home agent (WAHA) model. As a result, in May 2020, a significant percentage of the outsourced agents were working remotely.

COVID-19's impact was felt across the entire CX service industry, but it has not impacted in the same way across all providers. For instance, those CXSPs focused on providing services to industries such as telecommunications, high tech, born digital, and healthcare performed better than those with large accounts for the travel and hospitality or manufacturing industries. Outbound activities suffered the biggest cuts, while inbound customer service and technical support in some cases experienced significant growth. In general, smaller companies were not as successful as bigger providers that had the financial muscle and management resources to effectively deal with the challenges of the pandemic. Global providers with operations in Asia were aware of the situation first and had more time to coordinate and prepare a proper response and a successful transition to WAHA.

Frost & Sullivan expects this market to grow in the forthcoming years, based on a now consolidated offshore segment, as well as the recovery of the local markets. However, the rise and fall of major CXSPs will be largely determined by their ability to play a bigger role in their clients' path through the digital transformation.

This report provides a detailed assessment of the CXO services market in Latin America and the Caribbean, providing country-specific analysis, market shares, segmentations, and forecasts for several variables such as number of agents and workstations, adoption of WAHA, geography, markets served, industry vertical, channel of contact, service function, and technology adoption. The base year of this study is 2019 and forecasts reach to 2025.

Author: Sebastian Menutti