I cannot find a statistic for the number of call/contact centres or the volume of calls offered..can anyone out there give me a steer for their own country/continent (or indeed globally?)

All of the benchmarking reports I have access to seem to avoid these areas!

Datamonitor research suggests that there are seven million contact centre "seats" worldwide - anyone agree or disagree?

I have no idea Ann-Marie, though some concrete facts on this would be very nice.

Call centers / contact centers in and around the national capital of India, Delhi & NCR has over 500 call centers. Call center owners with their own setup are limited in number but people running centers on leased seats are many. In one building with 500 seats there are over 40 call centers running under different names and their seats vary from 5-20.

I feel 7 million is too big a figure.

...could be gained from finding out the number of licenses held by customers of all the larger WFMs (IEX, Aspect, InVision etc.)

Obviously this won't take into account all the contact centres not making use of this technology, but would be a good starting block.

Though if you just look at the Barclays group alone in the UK (and some offshored resource in India) we have over 7000 agents. Its a similar figure for teh other large Banks in the UK. So I don't feel that 7 million worldwise is too far-fetched.

Andrew White
Scheduling Consultant
Barclays UK Banking

Colleague organisations of CCMA (UK) in Europe (ECCCO) estimate that there are around 2.5 million agent positions there - so if we can get a handle on USA/ Canada we will be well on the way to establishing a total.