As more and more South African companies begin to realise the value of business process outsourcing (BPO), we're starting to mirror the international trend of outsourcing non-core functions. Lucky Khumalo, CEO of M-IT, an EOH company, expects that government's recent announcement regarding its targeting call and contact centres for growth may finally provide the catalyst the industry needs to become globally competitive.
"We've been waiting for the BPO boom for some time now. While the industry has definitely experienced very positive growth, this growth hasn't been to the extent we were waiting for," says Khumalo. While everyone is aware that premium telecommunications pricing and a lack of bandwidth has definitely contributed towards inhibiting growth, Khumalo is confident that the entry of new telco players will address this issue in the near future.
He feels it would be prudent to focus on a different issue in terms of developing this space, namely that of the employees staffing call centres: changing the perception that a job in a contact centre is an entry-level one that you hold for eighteen months at the most before moving onto greener pastures.
With the skills shortage throughout the country adding impetus to the drive towards BPO, Khumalo says this is an opportune time to invest in the staff who man these centres: "As more companies around the country are forced to focus on their core skills due to a lack of staff capacity, more and more functions are now falling into the BPO space.
"An excellent example of this is the recent outsourcing of traffic fines by the Metropolitan Police Department. This has already had an exceptionally positive impact on the payment of fines - motorists can't ignore their unpaid fines anymore; there are dedicated people whose job it is to track non-payers down and prosecute them. This makes it critical that the business process outsourcers staffing these centres ensure they attract the right type of person to the job and encourage them to stay."
Khumalo adds that the Metropolitan Police example demonstrates another benefit of BPO driving the outsourcing trend - that of accountability. "A key part of your service level agreement with a business process outsourcer will be that of measurable delivery. You thereby hold them responsible for delivering on their promises. This guarantees performance - something we as motorists are already seeing for ourselves in the case of the traffic department.
"The core challenge we're seeing in the BPO space from the outsourcer's point of view is in retaining its staff; getting them to consider a career in a company involved in BPO, as opposed to using it as an entry point into the organisation," says Khumalo. He believes the biggest opportunity to remedy this lies in management developing their staff, as this is how they would encourage them to stay.
"By adding value to their roles - teaching them the softer issues, for example; boosting their knowledge of programmes and processes, we could not only develop them into veterans, but add considerable value to the outsourced service we provide to the client."
With such a focus on staffing and skills levels in the country at the moment, the lesson for business process outsourcers would be to utilise and develop the captive skills they have at their disposal. By creating definite and rewarding career paths within these centres, their standards of service would not only improve, but the staff they employ would see the career potential in such companies, thereby reducing the high turnover rates traditionally associated with them.
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