Sitel’s announcement on 18 June to enter an agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of SYKES stock further consolidates the global CX services leaders. It also highlights the market shift to large-scale, multinational, and financially strong players able to make the needed investments in consulting, CX technology, and automation. Here is a short analysis of the deal. The[...]

  In February, industry veteran and CEO of SYKES, Chuck Sykes, commented during the earnings call on CX services market trends: ‘… in the U.S., at least in my time, there is no time in the company's history that I can recall seeing this level of labor challenge. And it actually is something that you're going to see in a lot of developed countries around the world.&[...]

  Three watershed moments in online sales and support happened in November and went somewhat under the radar. At the beginning of the month, StatCounter reported that mobile surpassed desktop browsing for the first time at a global level. Then for the Singles Day in China, e-commerce retailers JD and Alibaba not only announced record sales, but the latter opened up the event internatio[...]

Self-service has long been part of the customer service mix, dating back to user manuals, and progressing to the first IVRs, website FAQs, and experience sharing communities such as Amazon Help. Even though self-service support has a wide range of benefits and savings for consumers and businesses, its adoption has been slow – due partly to technological limitations, and to a tendency to use [...]

After a quiet year of acquisitions in the contact center outsourcing market in 2013, 2014 activity so far has been more inline with what we’ve come to expect of this market in terms of the volume of acquisitions. Most of the acquisitions so far this year have been to enhance, and in some case establish, geographic presence, for example: Webhel[...]