The trend to outsource call centre jobs to India may not pose such a serious threat to the UK job market as initially anticipated. That’s the summary of findings in a new report from Datamonitor.

Only 241,000 call centre roles will be located offshore by 2007, accounting for 5% of the global market, said the report.

And many of the jobs which are being outsourced abroad are “transactional, low added-value and rather boring”, according to the report’s author Ryan Powell. This creates opportunities for the UK market, he added, where employees could be retrained for positions requiring higher skill levels.

Another report from ContactBabel concluded that outsourcing might not bring the cost savings companies had hoped for, as call centres in India often had double the attrition rates of their UK equivalents, answered fewer calls and failed to measure customer satisfaction levels.

These reports were issued just as Shop Direct decided to transfer its Indian call centre operations back to the UK.