According to a recent study by Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), the Asia Pacific “continued to be a high-growth region for the contact center industry even during the global economic slowdown.”

Some effects of the slowdown started receding in 2010. As that happened, the study says, spending on customer service resumed among enterprises to meet the rising customer demand -- “the region recorded a 8.5 per cent growth in contact center agent seats, and by 2017, it is expected to have grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5 per cent.”

And as can be predicted, the economic downturn led to more of a concern for cost efficiency. This worked to the region’s advantage, since the Asia Pacific is regarded as a low-cost provider, one aspect of its status as “the offshoring destination of choice among service providers.” Alternative models such as the hosted contact center service also experienced higher uptake with the pay-per-use model emerging an attractive cost-cutting measure.

Obviously the heavyweights are India and the Philippines, with Malaysia and China coming on fast. Competition is increasing among other Asian countries jockeying for a niche with the strategy of pursuing “knowledge-intensive business processes that require significant domain expertise, rather than simply relying on their success in the voice segment,” according to the report.

And IP is a big winner: Markets across the Asia Pacific region “witnessed higher adoption of the Internet protocol (IP) technology due to their enterprises' desire to virtualize multi-site contact centers,” the study found. In other words, with IP, it doesn’t matter where your call center’s located.

TMC’s (News - Alert) Rajani Baburajan wrote recently that to meet customer demand, the region registered an 8.5 percent growth in contact center agent seats in 2010. By 2017, the number of seats is likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5 percent.