According to the   CTI Forum: 2006 Annual Call Center Industry Report, by the end of year 2005, the total agent seats had reached 216,000, with an overall market size of 25.53 billion RMB yuan ($U.S. 32.73 billion). And it still maintains an annual growth rate of over 10 percent. Like most of the other countries, medium and small sized call centers take the major share, with only 4% of the call centers running 200 and more seats, 26% of the call centers ranging from 50 to 200 seats, and 70% of the call centers being small ones of less than 50 seats. From a perspective of vertical industries, telecom, banking (including credit card), insurance, IT manufacturing, travel booking, logistics are still the major players while the other industries like catalog and TV shopping, e-commerce,  telesales, government agencies and public utilities growing rapidly.

Here are a few characteristics of the current China call center industry:

1. A trend of physical integration of call centers

The call centers of China Mobile, supporting its over 300 millions subscribers, have finished their province level consolidation and in most provinces are now running one or two physical centers supporting the whole province. Same plans have been mapped out or have already been undergoing with China Life, PICC, China Pingan Insurance, etc. With the exploding of China's credit card industry, credit card support centers of major banks like Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank, China CITIC Bank have all set up a unified single (some with backup sites) call center supporting the whole nation. These developments have resulted in the emergence of giant call centers, employing thousands of working agents. And they all face a similar challenge: how to run big centers more efficiently and effectively.

2. Call center concept penetration into all economic sectors

From government agencies to public utilities, from telecom, banking, insurance industries to chain stores, express deliveries and logistics, from radio and TV stations to newspapers, all the major areas of the society have begun to accept the concept of call center and are eager to let call centers to play an important role in their overall operations. And one day even someone with a dust bin factory visited our office to ask for help with getting their call center established.

3. Call centers' value have been appreciated much more than before

Increasingly, enterprises now have to upgrade the call center or customer service department to the same level as R&D, sales and marketing instead of just being a sub-branch under the marketing department. At the same time, the call centers have been granted more responsibilities, from pure after-sales services in the early stage to an overall support center covering pre-sales, order taking and post-sales services, and from service centers to becoming customer interaction centers or customer relationship management platform.

4. Need for call center professionals

A major Shanghai newspaper recently released a report entitled “Shanghai’s call centers are starving for talents.” The report reveals that Shanghai’s call centers are facing the common challenges of not being able to recruit qualified talents and are experiencing a high churn rate. Actually, the same situation is true of many regions throughout the country. The other hot spot concentrations of call centers in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dalian, and Chengdu are all facing the same problem, especially with service oriented centers. The lack of sufficient founding and a rapid scale-up and built-up of call centers all contributed to this problem.

After the initial stage of construction and facility setup, the need for professional consulting and training to help management teams run the centers efficiently and effectively have rapidly come into focus.  Many enterprises and call centers have realized that a fancy building and state-of-the-art communications and management technologies can’t help much without the right people who have the right insight and knowledge to run them.  I believe this need is becoming clear and that we’ll see the professionalism of China’s call centers develop rapidly in coming months.

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Wang Houdong is Operations Director for International Customer Management Institute, China (ICMI China), based in Beijing.  His responsibilities include certification, consulting, training and business strategy.