Frost Radar™: North American Customer Experience Outsourcing Services Market, 2021

The customer experience (CX) landscape is shifting rapidly. Enterprises across the board are realizing the significance of delivering excellent customer service as a competitive differentiator. Hence, this field is gaining more attention and greater investment priority. The CX outsourcing services market is also becoming much more tech-intensive as emerging tools are able to create a seamless and effortless CX while also significantly reducing costs across front- and back-end operations. The adoption of AI, advanced analytics, omnichannel capabilities, natural language processing (NLP), and streamlined security tools plays an important role in this competitive and dynamic market. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the North American CX outsourcing services industry experienced notable growth. Two factors are crucial in terms of understanding this positive trend. First, as social distancing measures limited physical encounters, relationships between brands and consumers became mostly virtual, thereby driving demand for contact center and remote CX services. Second, the pandemic brought about new challenges for in-house contact center operations, including the management of major remote operations, the implementation of several technologies to facilitate the work-from-home (WFH) model, and significant investments needed to provide a high-quality CX. Therefore, a growing number of companies started to outsource the bulk of their CX practices, which opened up major growth opportunities for business process outsourcing (BPO) providers. In a highly fragmented market composed of more than 200 organizations, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted the top 18 companies in this Frost Radar™ analysis in terms of market reach, user adoption, growth rates, product innovation, and customer experience. The analysis is based on a set of 10 criteria, as follows. Growth Index (GI) is a measure of a company’s growth performance and track record, along with its ability to develop and execute a fully aligned growth strategy and vision; a robust growth pipeline system; and effective market, competitor, and end-user-focused sales and marketing strategies. Key elements of this index include: • GI1: Market Share (previous 3 years) • GI2: Revenue Growth (previous 3 years) • GI3: Growth Pipeline • GI4: Vision and Strategy • GI5: Sales and Marketing Innovation Index (II) is a measure of a company’s ability to develop products/services/solutions (with a clear understanding of disruptive Mega Trends) that are globally applicable, are able to evolve and expand to serve multiple markets, and are aligned to customers’ changing needs. Key elements of this index include: • II1: Innovation Scalability • II2: Research and Development • II3: Product Portfolio • II4: Mega Trends Leverage • II5: Customer Alignment The Frost Radar™ reveals the market positioning of companies in an industry using their Growth and Innovation scores as highlighted in the Frost Radar™ methodology. The document presents competitive profiles on each of the companies in the Frost Radar™ based on their strengths, opportunities, and a small discussion on their positioning. Frost & Sullivan analyzes hundreds of companies in the industry and benchmarks them across 10 criteria on the Frost Radar™, where the leading companies are then positioned. Industry leaders on both the Growth and Innovation indices are recognized as best practice recipients. Author: Sebastian Menutti