A study reveals that South African contact centre agents are half as productive as their counterparts in Europe and Australia. The study's authors suggest that employing the right business intelligence systems is the key to unlocking local agent efficiency.
South African contact centre solution provider, Customer Service Engineering (CSE), has disclosed that poor efficiency, not lack of government incentives, is the main reason why the local contact centre industry is failing to grow at predicted rates. Part of a study comparing contact centres in South Africa with those in Europe and Australia, the finding suggests that poor efficiency and quality is driving costs up prohibitively.
“The current conversation within the industry is focused on increasing government incentives to attract more international business and, while this is an important discussion, our investigation suggests that the real issue is agent productivity,” observes Patrick Coleman, CEO of CSE.
According to Coleman, the study explains why South African contact centres can be more expensive than those in countries with much higher labour costs. “We have several key advantages that should enable us to produce extremely cost-effective contact centres,” he argues, “including a large pool of talent, agents with decent skills and very good English, and an inexpensive average monthly salary of US$1 000. However, our analysis suggests that the average South African agent is only producing 50% of the time and only solving the caller's problem first time around 60% of the time. This means that the average agent is only producing six days of productivity in every 21-day working month.”
This level of efficiency is in sharp contrast to other countries. “An Irish contact centre agent, for instance, earns three times more than his South African counterpart, an average of US$3 000 per month, but because quality management systems are installed and utilised, he is able to solve the customer's problem first time nearly 90% of the time, and since proper planning systems like Workforce Management are in place, his productivity is 85% on average,” explains Coleman, “which translates into 14.5 days of productivity per month.”
Coleman believes that poor agent efficiency remains a 'hidden' cost in many local contact centres, because the business intelligence systems needed to measure the exact cost per transaction are not in place. “Few contact centres have the right systems in place and, even if these have been purchased, they are not been employed correctly,” he confirms. “In either instance, the cost per transaction cannot be measured accurately and, as a result, is usually much higher than management realises.”
Solving customer problems first time is an area that Coleman identifies as key to improving a contact centre's cost per transaction. “A lot of inefficiency and customer dissatisfaction is created when agents have multiple conversations with a customer before a problem is solved,” he maintains, “which is why management needs to be able monitor, measure and evaluate calls and transactions precisely.”
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