| Need for Proactive Customer Care, Collections, and Alerts across Diverse Verticals Drive Outbound Dialing Market
Fueled by expanded proactive customer care and greater third party collections activity, the combined North American outbound premise and hosted outbound dialing market expects to grow at a robust rate in the next 3-5 years.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, North American Outbound Dialing Market, finds that the combined total market earned revenues of $267.7 million in 2007 and estimates this to reach over $522.0 million in 2014.
Retention strategies become more important as businesses distinguish themselves by delivering excellent customer care. There is also an increased emphasis on up-selling and cross-selling. To replace legacy dialing systems, enterprises seek out fully integrated outbound/blended solutions that integrate seamlessly with existing telephony infrastructure and offer multi-channel contact capabilities.
Overall, there is a significantly greater market opportunity for recurring revenue and excellent margins in hosted solutions. In particular, there is a high demand for automated outbound notifications, alerts and value messaging.
Targeted outbound calling and messaging are also key to expanding company value and branding among existing and newly acquired customers. With businesses today wanting to concentrate on delighting customers and not worry about IT infrastructure and maintenance, outbound dialing products vendors compete to provide customer care, through live agent or agent-less notification.
Vendors have also started promoting unified solutions that support both blended agent populations for inbound and outbound campaigns over stand-alone dialing products.
Small- and medium-sized businesses increasingly move to hosted outbound offerings due to their low upfront cost, fast implementation, and attractive 'pay-as-you-use' pricing model.
As such, hosted vendors with professional services and engineering teams, which enable faster and more efficient customized enterprise integrations, will have a distinct edge in the market.
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More Than 50% of U.S. Companies Want to Go Virtual in the Next Five Years
An increasingly large number of American companies are considering taking their business completely virtual in five years. A survey of C-level executives at U.S. companies reveals that more than half of these executives (53.4 percent) said they want to shift to a completely virtual company in the next five years.
Moreover, 80.8 percent of the executives said they were familiar with the advantages of e-commerce, and 30.1 percent said that if their business could afford the cost, they would be ready to go virtual right now. The survey was conducted by TIE Commerce, Inc., a provider of Business-to-Business eCommerce software, and The Mishra Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based marketing and public relations firm.
Given the major advancements in electronic business collaboration, it is now possible for a company’s internal operations, processes, and applications to remain current and connected with external trading partners. With each passing day, up-to-date, accurate company, customer and vendor information plays a greater role in the way they conduct business. Consumers demand instant results, and with a dedicated electronic framework, a business can boost sales, improve supply chain integration and exceed customers’ expectations, says TIE.
The survey also found that 83.6 percent of respondents cite their comfort level with technology as being a major factor in their willingness to go to a completely virtual business. According to TIE, major advancements in technologies such as Software as a Service (SaaS) alleviate the pressure of in-house software management, in turn making the transition to virtual business that much more obtainable.
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Improving Portable Media Players Will Expand Reach and Opportunity for Mobile Marketing
JupiterResearch, an authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, has found that introducing portable media players (PMP's) with internet browsing capabilities are likely to stimulate significant growth among those accessing wireless web and will create additional opportunity for advertisers, who are expected to spend $2.2 billion on mobile messaging, display ads, and search via mobile technology by the year 2012.
Adoption of Internet browsing on cell phones is expected to climb from 16 percent at the end of 2007 to 19 percent at the end of 2008. These findings are outlined in a new report published by JupiterResearch, "Mobile Internet: Adding Portable Media Players to the Mix to Drive Up Audience Size and Revenue." According to the report, the majority of page views and advertising impressions on cell phones and portable media players are on a small screen with a mini-browser. Impressions and click-through rates (CTR) per device, however, are higher for devices with full browsers.
In order to be truly successful, mobile carriers must continue to enable access with affordable portable media players and innovative business models while protecting their stake in the value chain by adding information layers to user profiles.
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Majority Uncomfortable with Websites Customizing Content Based on Visitors’ Personal Profiles
A majority of U.S. adults are skeptical about the practice of websites using information about a person's online activity to customize website content. However, after being introduced to four potential recommendations for improving websites privacy and security polices, U.S. adults become somewhat more comfortable with the websites use of personal information. These are some of the results of a nationwide survey of 2,513 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive.
Specifically, the survey found:
- A six in ten majority (59%) are not comfortable when websites like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (MSN) use information about a person's online activity to tailor advertisements or content based on a person's hobbies or interests. A quarter (25%) is not at all comfortable and 34 percent are not very comfortable.
- The remaining 41 percent who say that are comfortable with websites tailoring content is split between 7 percent who are very comfortable and 34 percent who are somewhat comfortable.
After four privacy/security policies were introduced, U.S. adults did change their opinions:
- A majority of U.S. adults (55%) indicates that they would be more comfortable with companies using information about a person's online activities to provide customized advertising or content.
- Interestingly, once the privacy/security policies were presented the percentages of those who are very comfortable increases only very slightly to 9 percent from 7 percent. The percentage who are somewhat comfortable given the privacy/security policies increases more significantly to 46 percent from 34 percent.
- Similarly, those who are not at all comfortable decline to 19 percent from 25 percent, and those who are not very comfortable decline to 26 percent from 34 percent.
Analysis of these results more closely by age indicates a difference in views by generations. Those who are younger Echo Boomers (aged 18-31) and Gen Xers (aged 32-43) are initially more comfortable with the notion of websites customizing content than Baby Boomers (aged 44-62) and Matures (aged 63 or older).
- After being presented with the privacy/security policies, all generations level of comfort increase. Echo Boomers increase to 62 percent from 49 percent. Gen Xers increase to 56 percent from 45 percent. Baby Boomers' comfort increases to a majority (52%) from 34 percent.
- Only Matures remain uncomfortable with the websites customizing advertising and content though the level of support rises to 46 percent from 31 percent.
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