Last year, according to Datamonitor’s Call Centers in the UK there were 4,100 call centers in the UK, employing 198,000 agent positions. By 2002, the market research company predicts, the UK will boast 274,000 call center positions, making the sector a bigger employer than agriculture and teaching combined.
The UK’s blossoming call center sector is already the biggest in Europe and likely to stay that way well into the next decade. Although other European call center sectors are growing more quickly, the UK sector is still maturing and will be among the leaders of the next stage of web-enabled call center development. Datamonitor says that the web-enabled call center market is expected to see compound annual growth of 105% between now and 2003 when the total of UK web-enabled centers should reach 950. The continental leader in web-enabled call centers, however, is Germany, with 32% of the European total. The UK is firmly in second place, with 22% of all European web-enabled call centers.
