North American Outbound Dialing Systems Markets

Collections Drive Outbound Dialing Systems Market in Spite of North American Economic Downturn

During the first half of 2008, the North American market for outbound dialing systems had grown at about 9 percent. With the slowing down of the economy, purchase decisions became extended and projects began to be placed on hold. By the fourth quarter, the U.S. and Canadian economies had all but ground to a halt. Major investment banks and insurance companies declared bankruptcy, unleashing the national and global credit crisis. In an effort to preserve cash, most enterprises have frozen all unnecessary spending, including the purchases of outbound dialing systems. "As the economies collapsed hundreds of thousands of people were laid off from their jobs, and unable to keep up payments such as credit cards, their debts mounted," notes the analyst of this research service. "Thus, one exception to the downturn in outbound dialing system sales in the second half of 2008 was sales of add-on capacity to support increased collection efforts." Debt collection has been and is expected to continue to be one of the leading applications supported by outbound dialing systems. The economic meltdown in North America has even triggered increased demand for debt collections and outbound dialing support. Laws have been enacted to safeguard consumers from being aggressively pursued by debt collectors, prompting collection agents to continually refine their processes and tune the outbound dialing systems and applications which support these processes. Optimizing the effectiveness of each contact has become critical.

Smaller Contact Centers and Enterprises Offer Scope for Market Growth

End user budget constraints will be a major restraint for the sales of interactive voice response (IVR) and voice portal solutions. This is especially relevant for companies that consider their customer service groups and contact centers primarily as cost centers. Regardless of the well-publicized successful speech enabled application deployments, the business cases for the use of speech in self-service applications remain unclear for many companies. For companies with limited IT resources, speech-enabled self service applications are seen to be too complex and expensive to consider. "The mission of most contact centers is customer service, not revenue generation, and these customer service-focused centers are typically operated as cost centers," observes the analyst. "The perception that outbound dialing is only useful for revenue generation has kept it from being more widely used in primarily inbound/customer service focused centers." The high-end of the outbound dialing systems market, outbound centric large enterprises, is fully penetrated. At least it is for the traditional outbound applications of telemarketing and collections. Going forward, smaller enterprises, smaller contact centers and proactive contact applications offer the most potential. Most non-outbound dialer users today work in contact centers, which consider customer service as their primary mission. Outbound dialing is perceived as a revenue only model or that it is synonymous with telemarketing and its negative connotations. Vendors must step up efforts to educate the market on the business value of outbound dialing for customer service. Longer term support for pro-active contact strategies, which will be adopted by companies of all sizes and industries will trigger the increased uptake of outbound dialing systems and other outbound customer contact applications.