The ICT industry could see the end of the traditional call centre within the next two to three years, according to Brendan van Staaden, CEO of Inter-Active Technologies, a specialist call and communication operation centre.
Inter-active Technologies has grown from a services-focused centre into a technology and outsourced contact centre. This year, it has expanded its services by deploying a new operations centre in Florida, south of Johannesburg. The company supports 250 contact centre agents and 70 customer liaison representatives, and facilitates inbound and outbound contact centres.
Van Staaden highlighted trends developing in the industry: “We are going to be having more data and customer-centric centres, customer self-service is going to pick up, as well as voice recognition and text-to-speech. Customers are going to start to get used to contact centre technology in a different way.”
Accessible
With the emerging sea cable infrastructure being implemented next year, broadband will become more accessible and have a driving influence over contact centre investment, he added. “The current bandwidth situation is one of the biggest barriers for driving innovation and investment. Given that the cost of bandwidth will go down from next year, we expect it will become easier for businesses to outsource.”
The international economic crisis has resulted in a sharp drop from overseas companies investing and outsourcing to South African contact centres, and companies are tightening their belts, Van Staaden said. He predicted debt collection companies will do particularly well during this time.
The playing field has changed and a new generation of customers is emerging into the market, said Mohammed Areff, CRM strategist from Mint, speaking at a Microsoft seminar. In addition, the contact centre is evolving into a customer value centre: “Customers are effectively driving the change in how contact centres interact and provide a service.”
Areff said the top trends redefining the industry are the transformation of a single channel back office into a multi-channel front office centre. One of the biggest challenges facing contact centres is to train customer service representatives quickly, while retaining them, he said. A high turnover of contact centre agents is attributed to the fact that agents are being affected by customer frustration, due to systems not being put in place, he noted.
John Swanepoel, sales manager for Bytes Systems Integration, said customers are changing the way they interact with call centres. The new generation of customers coming to the market are mobile-driven: “We've noticed that customers are using their mobile phones, e-mail, SMS and even social networking sites like Facebook to communicate with contact centres.“
Share