Outbound Call Center Week in Review

By Stefania Viscusi
Assignment Desk Editor

This week’s call center headlines – while not specifically focused on the outbound channel, have an importance to the industry as a whole because they speak of the move to get call centers back to the U.S. from outsourced areas and as a result, lots of news about new openings and hiring’s are hitting the headlines.

Home improvement store Lowes announced it is opening a third call center – this time in Indianapolis and is spending over $20.5 million to make it happen.

Once the call center is up and running – by the end of 2016 - reports suggest it will bring over a thousand jobs to the area.

The other Lowe’s call centers are located in North Carolina and New Mexico.

Another area that’s been on the hot list for call center locations is Texas. This week, it was reported that CustomerContactChannels (C3 (News - Alert)) opened up a number of new positions—400 to be exact—at its Waco, Texas facility.

Maybe an update to the outsourced facilities might draw interested businesses back for their call center needs. And that might just be on the horizon according to a recent prediction from Frost & Sullivan.

According to a new research report titled, “Latin American Contact Center Systems Market 2014”, analysts said the existence of legacy infrastructure in a number of large enterprises will make the market for contact center system vendors especially great in the region and may reach $380.6 million in 2018. This is an increase from 2013 when the market reportedly earned revenues of $260.4 million.

One contact center solutions provider is doing well already and has proof in their impressive second quarter earnings announced this week.

Five9 (News - Alert) reported a total revenue for the second quarter of 2014 increased an impressive 22 percent to $24.7 million compared to $20.3 million for the second quarter of 2013 and attributed the growth to organic expansion new additions to its product portfolio including new multichannel capabilities powered by Five9 Connect and their Summer Release 2014 with had new updates and features to boast.