On Tuesday, September 13, the SP2C presented the results of the annual study conducted with EY on the outsourced contact center business in France. The strong increase in revenue in 2021 reflects the way the industry has adapted to create value for the end consumer.
The French outsourced customer relationship market closed out a very dynamic 2021, with 10.8% growth - well above the 6.8% average of the past 5 years - which helped the industry reach a turnover of €3.34 billion, the SP2C, and EY, reported in the 2022 edition of their traditional Barometer of the economic, social and territorial impacts of outsourced contact centers in France. "2021 was an exceptional year, which materialized the fantastic effort made by the entire market over the past fifteen years. We should not see it as a simple catching up after Covid but as a lot of value creation for brands that come to look for a customer relationship skill that they no longer have in-house", explained Etienne Costes, EY-Parthenon partner in charge of the technology, media and telecommunications sector, during the presentation of the study at the Maison de la Radio. "It is often extremely difficult to stay up to date with the best customer relationship techniques. Contact centers have onboarded the skills and technologies that allow their customers to outsource value creation," he added.
Moreover, contact centers are being entrusted with an increasingly broad scope of actions with partnerships that go far beyond sales assistance, which still represents 70.8% of the turnover (CA) generated (+14%). Other activities are growing, notably around technical assistance (+16%) and moderation (+10%). Diversification activities now represent 11.4% of outsourced contact center revenues. Technology development, including digital, accounts for 45.4% of diversification revenues, with the largest increase coming from data analytics (+11.9%). "Long-term partnerships between outsourcers and brands enable the best possible experience to be provided, especially as in 2021, 90% of customer relationship professionals believe that their customers will have higher demands than in the past," said Léa Lalo, business transformation manager at EY.
Faced with the new demands of the end customer, outsourcers are helping brands to organize themselves: "Time is accelerating but the consumer's time is not necessarily the company's time. Few players have the skills to deliver so many quality acts in an industrial way", noted Ludovic Nodier, president of ESCA. If some contact channels are progressing, not all of them have yet shown their benefit in terms of value creation, in particular the chatbot which is the channel "most poorly rated" by customers.
Sectoral diversification
The telecom sector remains the leading contact center contractor and accounted for 26.6% of revenue generated in the French market in 2021, up (+12%) for the first time since 2017. The podium is completed by energy (17.6% of revenue) and the Retail & E-commerce sector, which accounts for 13.7% of revenue with a 13% increase over one year. The strongest growth was in the public sector (+68%), even though the outsourcing culture there is still underdeveloped. After a difficult year in 2020, the Travel & Hospitality sector is slowly returning to growth (+6% in 2021), driven in particular by the recovery of the tourism business.
The outsourced customer experience industry remains a significant provider of jobs. Across all geographies of production to serve the French market, members of the qualified market employed 132,772 employees in 2021 and created 8,240 positions that year. All of these areas will see growth in their workforce in 2021, echoing the strong growth in the market. The industry employed 41,151 full-time equivalents (FTEs) in France, representing 31% of the total workforce in this market. France recorded a 5% increase in its workforce in 2021, offsetting the slight decline observed in 2020 (-1.5%).
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