The communications sector in South Africa is thriving due to IP technology, which has led to lowered costs of integrated voice, video and data contact centres, according to KSS, a converged network provider.
Andre Maree, KSS MD, says: “The old call centre model built on analogue technologies was expensive to implement and expensive to run and did not deliver on the original perceived benefits. Traditionally, the difficulty lay in synchronising voice on an analogue line and data on an IP network, with the information arriving at the agent simultaneously.
“Today, however, there's a more competitive telecommunications regulatory environment. Cost cuts on bandwidth and IP-based solutions make it possible for five to 20-seat call centres to be established cost-effectively.”
Overall, contact centres are implementing better standards of service and greater performance management capabilities, says Maree. The conversion from the older analogue call centre systems to the IP-based contact centre model is having a marked effect on outsourced contact centre providers.
Maree notes that another trend emerging is the adaptation of call centre technologies to cater for disabled agents. “Disabled workers can now log onto the call centre remotely and, with the assistance of a broadband connection, be connected to the call centre applications and have calls distributed to them as if they were on site.”
He points out that one of the biggest challenges lies in designing a multilingual call centre. “It can present some difficulty. Not only do you need to have agents that can speak the language, but your IVR needs to be able to cater for these callers, and the applications the agents work with need to be adapted or translated into different languages.”
The country is well positioned to attract a growing international and local contact centre clientele, Maree says. “Customers are becoming more demanding with regards to the level of support and speed of service they receive, and want to be able to interact with companies via voice and data channels - be it standard analogue voice calls, cellphones, SMS, e-mail or a hybrid of these.
“IP technologies make this possible, and as the cost of bandwidth and telephony in SA continues to drop over the next three years, we will be increasingly competitive in the global contact centre market.”
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