International Customer Contact Benchmark 2019

The 2019 International Customer Contact Benchmark maintains its ambition to purvey the European Contact Centre market with this seventh annual comprehensive overview. This 7th edition of the Whitebook, see below for key findings, covers 30 countries within and outside of Europe.

• 4.31 mil. jobs, 1.23% of active population in Europe
• 3.5 mil. positions (seats)
• 40.400 contact centres
• Market Growth – 2,36% per annum
• Outsourcing – 26.5%
• 80% Validity

Companies are increasingly understanding the profiling potential of customer service and are obviously also willing to invest. The investment rate measures the average share of investment on total operating costs over the last 3 years. We see a clearly positive trend for the service centres surveyed.

Behind this is a desire to differentiate on the basis of excellent customer experiences. Today, 87 percent of the service centre Management surveyed ascribe a very important or important strategic importance to the service centre within the company.

We also see companies are investing in online channels for some years now. As early as 2014, around one third of all companies planned to introduce chat. Today, this share has risen to 50 percent and almost 30 percent of respondents said they already use chat. Consistent developments can be seen for the web portal. The video channel is also increasingly being tested and introduced.