Japanese Contact Center Outsourcing Services Market, Forecast to 2025

Contact center outsourcing offers businesses several advantages such as cost savings, business flexibility, and access to skilled talent, the best-in-class technology, and a mix of locations and delivery models. Also, outsourcing helps reduce the cost and risk exposure to businesses, and protects companies from industry, economic, and political uncertainties, thus allowing companies to be more flexible and responsive to the changing economic and market conditions.

As customer interaction is rapidly shifting from traditional channels to digital channels, the multi-channel customer experience has become a strategic priority. Contact centers are heavily investing in the omni-channel infrastructure to deliver non-voice services through digital channels including email, webchat, and social media among others. Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots are becoming more popular, as they have the potential to eliminate the heavy dependence of the contact center industry on human labor.

With digital transformation, contact centers will benefit from the collection of large datasets based on customer interaction; businesses can convert this data into useful feedback for their agents. Contact centers are investing heavily in analytics programs to build real-time dashboards with statistics to help call agents and managers get real-time updates on customer experiences.

In the wake of these changes, the Japanese contact center outsourcing market is transforming. In 2018, Japan reported growth of 2.7%, and is expected to grow steadily to cross $6.65 billion by 2025.

Japan's contact center outsourcing industry mostly serves domestic enterprises in the country. Japanese customers often require contact center support in their local language. Further growth in the local market in various sectors is anticipated.

Major Japanese cities are seeing talent saturation and rising wages; these are the biggest challenges that the industry faces. Some enterprises in Japan have moved their contact center services in-house due to quality concerns.

The hiring of expats to service the Japanese market is common in low-wage countries such as China, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Increasingly, global outsourcers are targeting Japanese language requirements to serve from these locations.

This study provides forecasts for the contact center outsourcing market by industry vertical, namely banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), consumer retail, information and communication technology, telecommunications, travel and hospitality, and others.

The top 2 contributing sectors towards Japan's revenue in 2018 were telecom and BFSI. Travel and hospitality, technology, and retail are poised to be the fastest growing sectors during the forecast period.

This study also highlights the contact center market revenue based on domestic outsourcing and offshore outsourcing forecasts. It covers market sizing based on forecasts for seats for 2014–2025. Various market drivers and restraints along with their impact on short- and long-term growth of the market are also discussed in this study.