Why should your company
set up a call center?

Here's one good reason:

You can meet your customers' sales and service needs at
a fraction of the cost of
doing it in person.

The next time a telemarketer interrupts your dinner with a sales pitch, you might want to hold your tongue. After all, your company has call centers, too -- doesn't it?

If your firm doesn't employ call centers for sales and customer service functions, it's probably falling behind the times. Perhaps it's time to investigate the advantages these labor- and telecom-intensive facilities could bring to your bottom line.

"Call centers are no longer a marginal business operation. They are a vital business process," says Katrina Menzigian, senior analyst with International Data Corp.'s Call Center Services. They're vital because product sales and customer service are essential to any organization, and growing numbers of companies are dialing up call centers to address those concerns.

Indeed, the call center industry was already a US$54 billion business by early 1998 in North America alone. In the United States, projections call for approximately 98,000 call centers nationwide by 2003 (see charts of top U.S. states and metro areas). The industry, regardless of where it's found around the globe, is growing by leaps and bounds -- some 20 percent annually.

"I have not seen an industry grow like the call center industry in all my years of doing this," claims Princeton, N.J.-based John H. Boyd, a location consultant for the past 24 years.

"North America definitely took the lead in establishing call centers," reports Janice Waugh, co-founder of Toronto-based MW Productions, which organizes some of the call center industry's best educational forums (see sidebar). "Then activity started happening in Europe, and probably to some degree in Australia. Then it expanded to other places in the Asia-Pacific. Now call centers are going to South America, and I actually read recently that India now has call centers too. So the industry truly is expanding around the world."