International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)) recently weighed in on the state of the worldwide customer care business process outsourcing (BPO) market so far this year with its latest MarketScape report, assessing vendors in this space. The report identifies a handful of vendors — West Corporation, Aegis, IBM (News - Alert), and Teleperformance — as leaders in the market for 2013.
Other vendors named as part of this analysis include Alorica, APAC, Computer Generated Solutions (CGS), Convergys, Hewlett Packard, Sitel, Stream Global Services, Sykes, TeleTech (News - Alert) and Xerox.
The MarketScape report suggests that these vendors' ability to adapt to shifting customer needs has a noteworthy effect on their performance. In particular, IDC states that the four pillars of what it has defined as the '3rd Platform' — the next-generation compute platform (mobile device accessed, cloud based) that will supplement 1st Platform (mainframe) and 2nd Platform (distributed computing) solutions.
The four pillars of the 3rd Platform are big data and analytics, cloud, mobile and social.
Most of the companies listed as market leaders have embraced one or all of these pillars to some degree. For example, West Corporation has identified the importance of social media and mobile apps in the contact center, outlining how both provide customers with immediacy and reach not available from other channels.
"The customer care BPO market has reached a high level of maturity, yet the dynamics of customer interactions are causing a fundamental shift in the demand for and delivery of these services," said. "The dynamic changes in the way that customers connect with companies, in particular via mobile and social, combined with companies' newly focused look at customer experience are pushing customer care BPO providers to move deeper into their clients' operations and have a greater impact on their business."
This IDC MarketScape report factored extensive buyer input into its research, including phone interviews of the participating vendors' clients.