These days, companies of all sizes all over the world are working hard to improve their customer service. They aim to better serve existing customers, establish long-term loyalty, and create new customers relationships, and the contact center, as the focal point of communications, is key in achieving these goals in the contact center.

Now, customers have growing expectations of service quality, and enterprises must invest in systems and staff to meet these demands, which is where outsourcing employees is essential. Contact center outsourcing has increasingly spread around the globe as an effective strategy in improving customer satisfaction, and some areas of the world are more sought after than others.

Over the past few years, Vietnam's economic growth has been among the highest in the Asia Pacific region. Focusing on customer service, Vietnam is driving customer relationships to improve loyalty, brand recall and profitability. Additionally, Vietnam is an effective, low-cost alternative destination for outsourced services as hiring IT professionals is 30 to 50 percent less expensive than other outsourcing countries like India and the Philippines.

Dao Thi Minh Thao, a research associate in the ICT Practice at Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) APAC, recently told Destination CRM that this effort is leading to high growth in the contact center industry, worth about $4.2 million in 2011 and is expected to reach $11.4 million in 2018, with a growth rate of 15 percent.

In the Vietnam contact center market, automatic call distributor (ACD), computer telephony integration (CTI (News - Alert)), interactive voice response (IVR), and call monitoring are the primary trends. "ACD is the biggest contributor that accounts for almost 40 percent of all applications and is still growing at a fast rate as majority of contact centers' primary purpose is to support incoming voice calls,” explained Thao. “It is forecasted that in 2018, ACD will reach the saturated status of 31.7 percent from 37.3 percent in 2011 and start to slow down.”

Some of the largest contributing verticals in Vietnam are financial services and telecommunications because of an increasing customer base and supply of capital to invest in technologies. These industries are also characterized by large deployments of centers with 200 seats and more, Thao commented.

“Currently, the less than 50 seat contact centers comprise only more than two percent. Over time, the market is expected to see a higher growth of less than 50 seats and 51-200 seat horizontals based on the increasing demand from the SMB segment and more integrated, cost-effective solutions provided,” said Thao.