Telephony cost is a major factor in local contact centres, forcing them to juggle labour expenses and other efficiencies in trying to compete with international outsourcing locations.
"Call centres that are providing outsourcing services to international companies typically have local diallers operating on as much as a three to one ratio - three lines dialling possible numbers for one agent. While on a call, the predictive dialler tries to establish contact with another right party contact on the additional lines. This means that for every agent, as many as three outbound telephone lines are busy for 80% to 90% of the time, making outbound calls to overseas countries such as the UK and the US at exorbitant international rates," explains Mark Edwards, Director: Products and Services at Intuate Group.
To address this inefficiency, Intuate Group, as the preferred Noble Systems partner in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, is currently developing a solution with Noble Systems that will allow a predictive dialler to be stationed in an overseas location such as the UK, while the agents of the outsourced contact centre are still based in South Africa.
Through a VOIP connection, the calls will be initiated and handled by the agents in South Africa, but routed through the dialler in the UK and charged at local UK rates instead of international rates, resulting in major cost savings. According to Edwards, this can cut international outsourcing customers' telephony costs by as much as 66%.
"This is made possible thanks to the additional bandwidth and increased reliability as a result of the Seacom undersea cables," he states. "Today's advanced technology also has far fewer components than in the past, and because ours is an integrated solution in a consolidated environment, it is now quite simple to achieve, while before it would have been practically impossible to split up the components of a call centre system.
"What's more, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is making the implementation of such a solution even simpler as it carries the data traffic and provides easy access for local agents over a SIP provider.
"Being able to make use of this type of technology opens up many opportunities for South African contact centres," says Edwards. "Now, with new possibilities that can impact the bottom line positively and make contact centres more profitable, South Africa will become an ever more attractive outsourcing destination."
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