Contact centres are having a profound effect on organisations' abilities to deliver high quality services in the African region.
This was the consensus during the panel discussion about the trends and challenges shaping the future of Africa's contact centres, at the Interactive Intelligence Customer Experience Executive Forum in Johannesburg this week.
According to Rod Jones, head of Rod Jones Consulting, in Africa there is little knowledge or understanding about the operational realities of contact centres.
Jones noted much work needs to be done to provide this knowledge, both at the executive and the middle management levels.
Deon Scheepers, manager sales operations Africa at Interactive Intelligence, said for the foreseeable future, most people will still use voice to interact with contact centres. Therefore agents cannot leave customers waiting in a costly and frustrating queue for a long time.
Also, language continues to be a barrier. While speech recognition for self-service is common around the world, Africa's diverse languages and dialects have delayed the use of speech as a self-service engine, said Scheepers.
This is more so in South Africa with its 11 official languages, he added.
The language challenge also impacts on contact centre staffing - if businesses want to provide for multiple-languages, they need to recruit and train accordingly, he continued.
Gavin Atkinson, CEO call centre at BankservAfrica Integrated Solutions, says when deploying voice recognition technology, the range of accents and multitude of languages across Africa presents some challenges mainly because it is costly to write utterances for the various languages.
Also, most contact centres are struggling to move to the true digital multi-channel environment, "Most of contact centres across the continent are still using legacy infrastructure and are struggling to move to the new digital world," says Atkinson.
However, in South Africa, where contact centres are well established, the role of the contact centre is changing significantly - they are becoming the last point of contact as opposed to the first, he notes.
The young generation especially will opt to use internet and mobile applications first and therefore contact centres, as the last point of contact, should deliver absolute resolution of the query in one call, says Atkinson.
Therefore, contact centre agents need to understand their customer base and apply the right technology to the right segment - because one size does not fit all, said Gareth Mellon, programme manager, ICT team at Frost & Sullivan Africa.
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