Blighty call centres boom in face of offshore threat

The UK call centre industry is continuing to boom despite the threat from lower cost offshore locations such as India, according to a new report.

The UK Contact Centres in 2007: The State of the Industry report by analyst ContactBabel shows the UK call centre industry grew by six per cent last year and is now worth £20.6bn.

Call centres currently employee 960,000 UK workers - three per cent of the country's working population - and this figure is predicted to pass the one million mark by the end of this year. The report also predicts steady growth in the industry here for at least another five years.

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Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel, said the boom in offshoring to India and other destinations such as South Africa and Eastern Europe has not had the negative effect on the UK call centre industry that many predicted.

He said in the report: "The amount of new work going offshore is slowing, with 2006 seeing several high-profile companies announcing their return to the UK."

Salaries for UK call centre agents rose by eight per cent last year. A regional breakdown shows the North East relies most on the call centre industry, with almost five per cent of workers in the region employed there.

The report also found the level of cold-calling telesales and telemarketing activity is continuing to decline in UK call centres. Outbound calling activity as a proportion of all calls has dropped from 32.9 per cent in 2005 to 29.1 per cent and, for the first year on record, the actual number of outbound calls made by UK call centres has fallen.

The increasing use of the Telephony Preference Service, which lets people opt out of receiving cold sales calls, is one of the factors behind this fall.

Morrell said: "Cold calling is increasingly seen as old-fashioned, expensive and potentially damaging to a company's reputation. Legislation at a national and European level has reduced the number of unwanted sales calls that UK consumers receive."

But he said outbound communication will still have an important part to play in business, with companies using it to let customers know in advance about things such as approaching credit limits or delayed flights.