US to be harder hit by offshoring

A quarter of outsourced US call centre jobs will be lost over the next three years as companies are increasingly forced to move the work to cheaper overseas locations or use automation, according to a new report by analyst Datamonitor.

The US had 37% of the world's outsourced call centre positions in 2004 but the Datamonitor report, Contact Centre Outsourcing in the US predicts that global market share will shrink by a quarter by 2008, from 315,000 jobs to 291,000. Outbound telemarketing positions will be worst hit, accounting for 90% of the US call centre jobs lost, mainly due to the introduction of the 'Do Not Call' registry and the higher revenues available from inbound call centre work.

Datamonitor's Ri Pierce-Grove said call centre outsourcers are reinventing themselves and extending into the more lucrative business process outsourcing market. "The boundaries between US-based contact centre providers and other business process outsourcers are dissolving, and firms are invading each others' territories," he said.