Key Findings & Highlights:

The global CMS market is dominated by a slowly declining voice channel 78% ($51.3bn), with a consistent increase in non-voice revenues over chat, social media, and self-service. Revenues from digital channels are growing faster than the overall CMS outsourcing market, set to have CAAGR of ~21% through 2020.

Over the next four years, text based channels will become firmly established as the second most important channel, tripling in size. Voice channel revenues will decline marginally, supported by increased complexity of interactions and greater focus on revenue generating activities, leading to increased outbound calls; and customer experience investments by clients creating additional volumes. Chat, messengers, and social media will be used as integral, not complementary channels for all services. The fastest growing channels will be web and mobile self-service and video.

Channel enablement and optimization is delivered by vendors’ dedicated consulting units (or in a few cases by operations). It is offered as an embedded service with no or little up-front cost for the client. Vendor capability to integrate client knowledge bases, customer-facing self-service, and agent desktops will be table stakes for outsourcing multi-channel delivery. In the near future, multi-channel customer experience with a focus on digital channels will be delivered as part of wider transformational initiatives including customer journey mapping, integration of channel analytics, and customer experience optimization.

Next-best-action tools, automated social media support, and proactive technical support will be the next key investment areas for CMS vendors.