+30%

Growth in the world call center market in the past five years, according to CIRC research

Source: Dr. Ki-Ju Cheong, president, Callcenter Information Research Center, Swangju, Korea

75%

Attendees of ICMI's recent ACCE conference who report that their centers' workloads are growing (versus remaining flat or declining). Just under half (45%) report that their centers' budgets are growing.

Source: ICMI

The percentage of centers that do NOT survey customers who contact them via these channels:

• Chat: 63.3%

• Fax: 63%

• Web self-service: 61%

• Web calls: 56.2%

• Email: 51.7%

• IVR contacts: 51.6%

• Phone (live agent): 21.5%

Source: ICMI's Multichannel Contact Center Report III (2007)

Quotable A large percentage of the world's population gained access to technologies that I, in setting out on my long career in 1948, could not have imagined except in the context of science fiction. These new technologies not only opened up a whole new vista of low-cost communications, but also facilitated major advances in finance that greatly enhanced our ability to direct scarce savings into productive capital investments, a critical enabler of rapidly expanding globalization and prosperity.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, in his recently-released book, The Age of Turbulence, pp 11-12.