The CX landscape is changing rapidly. Organizations across the board are realizing the importance of delivering excellent customer service as a competitive differentiator. Hence, the domain is gaining more attention and greater investment priority. The market is also becoming much more tech-intensive as emerging tools are able to create a seamless and an effortless CX while also significantly reducing costs across front- and back-end operations. The adoption of AI, advanced analytics, omnichannel capabilities, NPL, and streamlined security tools plays an important role in this competitive and dynamic market.

Companies are expecting continuous process enhancement and rapid and constant innovation. As organizations must adapt to changing market conditions, they are looking to partner with nimble CXSPs to speed up time to market. The right mix of people, processes, and technology is the key to success and will help providers bring reliable and agile transformation capabilities to their clients.

Although the pandemic has affected people and economies across the world, the CXO services landscape has benefited from this situation. Two factors are crucial in terms of understanding this positive trend. Firstly, as social distancing measures limited physical encounters, relationships between brands and consumers became remote (mostly), thereby driving demand for contact center and remote CX services. Secondly, the pandemic brought about new challenges for in-house contact center operations, including the management of major remote operations, the arrangement of several technologies to facilitate the WAHA model, and the mobilization of investments needed to provide a high-quality CX. Therefore, a growing number of companies started to outsource all (or the bulk of) their CX practices, which opened up major growth opportunities for BPOs.

Voice-based interactions account for the bulk of the CXO business. Nevertheless, this service has been affected by commoditization, implying that it is easy to find in the marketplace and most providers can offer it. Hence, it can hardly constitute a competitive edge for any provider, and the competitive dynamic is far detached from it. Consequently, most providers link their competitive strategies to the ability to offer digital solutions and consulting services and position themselves as digital transformation enablers and trusted advisors. As a result, many CXSPs are opening digital divisions or innovation departments and investing a significant amount of resources to strengthen their digital value proposition.

This Frost & Sullivan study provides a detailed assessment of the CX outsourcing services market in North America. It offers market share, segmentation, and forecast for several variables, including full-time agents, fulfillment region, industry vertical, born-digital versus traditional companies, channel of contact, and service function. The base year is 2020 and the forecast period runs from 2021 to 2027.

Author: Sebastian Menutti