Asia Pacific had surveyed to have an increase in the contact center business. Although most businesses suffered from the present economic crisis, let us not ignore the fact that there is still future growth. In 2008, the contact center industry had more than 1.7 million seats in relation to the total number of seats in Asia Pacific. As projected, the contact center business will develop at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.5% crossing more than 3 million seats by 2014. The promising industry development had dealt the unique set of challenges.Today, the most significant role of a call center industry is to offer Customer Centricity. Businesses must deal with the rising cost demands, training & motivating agents, increasing customer expectations, installing web & multimedia applications and other challenges.

A two day summit held in Crowne Plaza Mutiara hotel in Kuala Lumpur called 4th annual Customer Contact Asia Pacific Summit was hosted by Frost & Sullivan. The goal of the said summit is to address present business challenges and to introduce techniques. According to the industry manager, for ICT at Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, Shivanu Shukla, the contact center business in Asia Pacific had invested in customer care and contact center applications continuously. The goal of the summit is to keep the discussion up to date and interactive through simultaneous tracks, CEO dialogues, panel discussions and executive insights. Even though there is a slow economic situation in the last 6 months of 2008, there is still an increase in domestic demand and a stable development in outsourcing. They expect that the contact center clients in Malaysia will attain good growth in the next 3-5 years. The theme, The people, processes & technologies that deliver customer satisfaction and excellence had thought the leaders at the meeting exposed on areas of some of the 8 enemies of employee engagement:

1. Attracting, retaining and engaging generation Y staff
2. Building a successful remote contact center agent program
3. Customer care in a down economy
4. Change management towards business excellence
5. Structuring and organizing the contact center for greater competitiveness
6. Creating excellent customer experiences

Famous speakers came from various regions like Engagement Matters, Interactive Intelligence, Aspect Software, Brandt International, IDEA Cellular, NTUC Income Insurance, OCBC Bank Group, Business Processing Association of the Philippines, Convergys, DiGi Telecommunications and Lenovo group. The gold sponsor of the summit was Convergys while the breakfast briefing sponsor was the Cisco Systems. Aastra, Aspect Software, Interactive Intelligence, Oracle Communications and Salesforce.com were the conference sponsors. Jebsen & Jessen Communications was the Exhibitor sponsor and Plantronics was the Technology sponsor. PACNET sponsored the Lanyards for the summit. The supporting associations for the summit Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P), BPO Services Association Unlimited (BSA/U), Customer Relationship Management and Contact Centre Association Malaysia (CCAM) and Hong Kong Call Center Association (HKCCA). The official Newswire was PRNewswire. Business Today, China CSR, Chinatechnews, China Newswire, Developing Telecoms, Innovation in CRM, Strategic Path Asia and ZDNet Asia were the media partners for the summit. [via]