Jennigay Coetzer
8 April 2004
Johannesburg — SA could become world's customer service capital
THERE has been a dearth of spending on call centre equipment in SA over the past couple of years, due to the downturn in the international economy.
But the market has picked up over the past six months because companies realise they need to upgrade to remain competitive, says Deon Scheepers, technology solutions director at Atio.
He says companies tend to prefer to own their call centre rather than outsource it, although recent local tenders ask bidders to quote on both.
"But nine times out of 10, the decision will be to go for ownership of the technology."
SA is starting to show up on the radar screen of organisations in the US and Western Europe seeking to outsource call centre activities offshore, says independent consultant Rod Jones.
However, there is a lack of unity of purpose in the local call centre industry, with professional and trade associations doing their own thing.
This has given rise to regional rivalry, which could have a negative effect on the industry.
Scheepers says the South African market could soon come under threat from African neighbours like Botswana, where government supported an initiative to equip a 1000-seat call centre.
"Botswana has no telecoms regulatory issues to contend with and has a large unemployed labour force."
Research shows that 70% of call centre owners are implementing or investigating Voice XML, a technology that allows a large percentage of customer queries to be handled by speech recognition.
"This could pose a threat to job creation efforts in SA," says Jones.
India's call centre industry is winning the lion's share of offshore business process outsourcing deals, says Tania Joffe, GM for call centres at Absa.
She says the South African call centre industry will never compete against India for offshore deals on cost, but has the potential to become the customer service capital of the world.
"We have a latent talent for customer service that can be built on," says Joffe.
Absa has set up an offshore operation at its 1450-seat call centre in Johannesburg, where it is running a customer helpdesk for TransUnion, a US-based credit-rating bureau.
Joffe says by extending the use of its existing infrastructure to provide the offshore service during off-peak hours the bank has halved the fixed costs of its call centre.
"We have had 123 potential South African offshore customers visiting our call centre to see what can be achieved in this country."
She says, however, the risks are high and managing servicelevel agreements for an external customer is challenging.
World Outsource is providing operational management services for Absa's Johannesburg call centre.
The company operates a local outsourced call centre facility for UK telecommunications network operator BT in Johannesburg, where about 50 agents handle directory inquiry calls for the company's UK subscribers.
"We are also providing resource management services for UK-based Budget Insurance, for its three call centres in the UK and another in Cape Town, which is due to roll out on June 4," says Kit Marr, group operating officer.
The company runs the Gauteng provincial government's call centre, where the transport department went live in March.
Merchants SA, a Dimension Data company, has set up a 500seat call centre to handle IT user support and billing queries for a major US-based media communication group under the code name Operation Swordfish.
"The identity of the customer is still under wraps," says MD Martin Dove.
He says workforce management and the training of 1000 call centre agents over an eight- month ramp-up period were among the biggest challenges.
"Finding senior people with the skills to do the scheduling of shifts for a call centre that operates around the clock was also difficult, because this is not a common requirement."
Challenges included a lack of public transport with consequent careful scheduling of shifts.
Dove says for 35% to 40% of the call centre agents it was their first job. "We adopted the approach of recruiting people with a customer service excellence mindset, and provided them with technical training."
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