Call centres are an important part of many UK industries, but a recent report from ContactBabel revealed which sectors employ the most contact centre call agents and the growing use of cloud contact centre technologies across the board.
The study, UK Contact Centres: 2019-2023, sheds some light on the way different UK industries make use of call centre technology to place outbound sales calls and to handle inbound customer support.
Nearly one in five call centre agents in the UK works in the finance sector, which is responsible for 18% of the entire workforce.
However, finance firms don’t have the most call centres in terms of overall numbers – that accolade is held by the retail and distribution sector, which operates 13% of all UK contact centres.
Several other sectors are also significant in the UK call centre industry, including telemarketing for obvious reasons, but also the services and public sectors, IT and telecommunications, and utility providers.
“Almost 4% of the UK’s working population are employed in contact centres,” the report states. “Average contact centre size is 125 agent positions, with outsourcers, utilities, communications and finance contact centres having a larger than average mean size.”
The rise of cloud call centre technologies
The survey asked respondents what cloud call centre technologies they already use, or plan to use within the next two years.
Call routing and call recording scored highest, with 45% and 37% already using these as cloud services and a further 15% and 16% planning to do so within two years.
IVR and speech recognition ranked as the third most popular cloud call centre technology; 30% already use this as a cloud call centre service, and a further 17% expect to do so in the next 24 months.
Completing the top five call centre cloud technologies were CRM/agent desktop and workforce management – and both are closing the gap on the top three substantially.
At present, 26% of respondents use cloud-based CRM and 19% use cloud-based call centre workforce management.
But the figures for the next two years are significantly higher – adding 27% and 24% to those totals respectively.
That would see cloud call centre CRM rank joint second alongside call recording, and behind only call routing as the most common contact centre cloud technology, while cloud workforce management would be just four percentage points behind cloud IVR/speech recognition.
Advantages of cloud call centres
Read our blog 5 Benefits of Cloud Contact Centres to find out why cloud call centres are a scalable solution with excellent access from all over the world.
Some of the direct advantages of cloud call centre technology include:
- > Remote access from any available internet connection.
- > Advanced IVR features including ‘golden ticket’ call routing for VIPs.
- > Instantly scalable capacity to meet demand on any given day.
- > Inherent cloud resilience and dependable Microsoft Azure interconnect.
- > Flexible pricing and ability to reduce billing immediately when demand drops.
Together these benefits give cloud call centres flexibility and reliability, along with the ability to use talented call centre agents based all over the world – all while ensuring you only get billed for the capacity you use on any given day.
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