In five to ten years, about 50,000 Romanians will be working in the contact-centre and business outsourcing industry, Florin Talpes, general manager of Softwin told ZIARUL FINANCIAR. There are 5,000 people employed in this industry at the moment.
A contact centre is a centre that specialises in customer or potential customer relations through various communication channels, such as phone (call centre), fax or Internet. Business outsourcing refers to the outsourcing of some processes of certain departments, such as the financial, marketing or sales departments.
Accounting for an average net salary in the industry of about 300 euros, 50,000 employees would be paid approximately 276 million euros in salaries, taxes and social security contributions included.
At the moment, the contact centre market stands at some 30 million euros. Less than 15 million euros of revenue is generated by the local consulting and services clients, while over 15 million euros is derived from the outsourcing of services by companies from outside Romania, Talpes estimates.
The market of contact centre and business outsourcing will amount to 350-500 million euros in five to ten years, Talpes added.
"The latest international surveys show that most customers of a company (68% i.e.) stop using its services due to the poor or inexistent customer service," Cosmin Mares, communication manager with Softwin told ZIARUL FINANCIAR.
"Most of the Romanian companies prefer to set up their own call centre. This is a normal development stage. As the customer support services become more complex, many will prefer to outsource this service to specialised companies, for cost reasons," Mares added.
Demand for contact centre services in Romania is growing by 20% a year, and the number of companies that provide support to their customers through their own specialised department or outsourced services stands at about 250, Mares says.
"Still, the market is very small. As a comparison, the Hungarian market is put at about 330 centres with half of the Romanian population, while the German market at over 2,800."
In addition, creating their own customer support department would entail quite a large financial investment for many Romanian companies. This investment includes salary costs, employee training, and the necessary hardware and software infrastructure, so outsourcing this service to a specialised company is the ideal solution to address this need, Mares believes.
He added the major Western companies account for about 70% of the business of some contact centre providers in Romania.
"A contact centre allows a company to boost its revenue by more than 35% and to improve its customer satisfaction," Mares specified.
The local companies that are most interested in such services at the moment are in the banking and telecommunications sector. "Sooner or later, the private utilities, such as electricity or thermal power suppliers will come to Romania. At that time, there will be a pressing need for such services. The same will happen with retailers or car dealers," Mares said.
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