Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Report on EMEA Contact Center Market Released

November 07, 2011

The sales of agent performance optimization or APO tools in the contact center market have been exerted a significant restraining effect. This is due to the recent economic downturn in Europe, Middle East and Africa or EMEA. Quality monitoring or QM, call recording and workforce management or WFM software have experienced a decrease in sales. With projections for future growth, the market is now slowly recovering.


In 2010, revenues of $925.1 million were earned by the market. By 2017, these revenues are expected to reach $1480.9 million. This information has been provided by Frost & Sullivan in the report ‘Contact Centre Systems Markets in EMEA’. Six product segments are covered by the report. These include inbound contact routing systems, interactive voice recorder or IVR and voice portal systems, outbound dialler systems, quality monitoring systems, workforce management software and contact center analytics.

In a release, Suvradeep Bhattacharjee, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan said, “The decline in APO tools mirrored a similar decline in the automatic call distribution or ACD market, to which APO sales are strongly linked. The decline can also be attributed to the historical resistance to recording and WFM in the major EMEA countries, especially Germany.”

The downturn in the major western countries was not offset by growth in the East and South. With the market making a gradual recovery, the scenario is however more upbeat.

Bhattacharjee said, “The contact center systems market in western Europe is relatively mature, although eastern Europe, Russia and Commonwealth of Independent States or CIS as well as the Middle East and Africa will experience higher growth rates starting 2011 due to the demand from outsourcers and financial services sector.

According to Bhattacharjee, the public sector and outsources will be the main contributors for growth in western Europe.

Different countries within EMEA have markets maturing at different rates. All Tier 1 vendors of contact centre systems face a key market challenge. They need to find and expand into the underpenetrated countries outside the core markets of western Europe. In order to displace competitors and gain market share, all companies are under pressure to innovate due to the declining economy.

In other news, recession-hit countries in Europe are scrambling to scale down their cost as much as they can. Many public sector firms in the region are likely to outsource more call center jobs in the days ahead, says a report from market research firm Frost and Sullivan.



Carolyn John is a Contributor to ContactCenterSolutions. To read more of her articles, please columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell



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