The majority of contact centres in SA are shunning outbound contact centre agents.
This was revealed in the ITWeb-Ocular Technologies Contact Centre Survey, which ran online for two weeks, attracting 140 responses.
Of those surveyed, 41.06% revealed they do not have outbound contact centre agents, while 28.08% indicated they have 21 to 50 agents who are outbound.
According to Ebrahim Dinat, chief operations officer of Ocular Technologies, most contact centres perform outbound dialling, but this is done manually. He says customers tend to view predictive dialling equipment as expensive, and only a necessity if a contact centre has less than 100 agents.
Staffing costs
However, he explains that in reality, having an automated dialler ensures that enterprises call the right customers at the right time, thereby increasing efficiencies and reducing call costs significantly. Automated outbound diallers also reduce staffing costs by automating the collections process and streamlining agent desktops and workflow.
“We will find that there will be an increase in the usage of outbound diallers over the next few years. With legislation like the [Consumer Protection Act], enterprises will employ diallers to comply with regulatory changes through improved controls, tools and reporting,” he states.
Besides inbound and outbound call routing, the survey also asked which additional channels of interaction the respondents use. E-mail routing (68.80%) emerged as the most prominent channel, distantly followed by SMS routing (41.60%). Other preferred channels were Web chat/instant messaging (32.80%) and social media feeds (14.40%).
“Most consumers today have access to e-mail, and it makes sense that contact centres use e-mail as an interaction channel. For consumers who are always on the go with hectic schedules, it's much easier to interact with a contact centre via e-mail, as opposed to performing an inbound call,” Dinat explains.
Dominant players
Cisco, with 33.33%, was the most popular, with Avaya trailing at 20%. About 16% said they are unsure, while Aspect Software came in at 10.67%. The other choices were Siemens and Asterisk, which tied at 6.67%; Alcatel and Nortel, both at 5.33%; and Ericsson and Genesys, which each had a 4% share.
On which automatic call distributor(ACD) or private branch exchange (PBX) product they are using for the routing of inbound calls to agents, most contact centres (30.04%) said they are unsure. However, besides the uncertain ones, Cisco still came out tops with 19.02%, followed by Avaya, which attracted 16.08%.
Dinat notes that the figures showing that Cisco and Avaya have the largest PABX/contact centre market share in SA confirms international PABX/contact centre market share research. “Both are strong contenders in the inbound contact centre market, but Cisco places seventh in the North American outbound dialler market,” he notes.
Dinat also states that Avaya and Cisco seem to have hit the winning PABX product selling strategy, not just locally, but worldwide. “The channel to market is through specialised large IT solutions providers, who not only sell telecommunications equipment, but also a variety of other products and solutions, including data centre solutions, network integration, operations management, security solutions, etc.”
He also points out that South African call centres are relatively small, and that the average call centre employs about 70 agents. “In this environment, for a company that uses an Avaya or Cisco PABX for the back-office, it is relatively simple to deploy call centre functionality as an add-on feature when required to provide customer service.”
Most of the survey responses (35%) came from middle management, followed by IT specialists (25.71%), while 26.86% of respondents came from companies that employ between 500 and 5 000 people.
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