Kenya sees contact centre boom

The landing of fibre optic cables last year has provided the sector with capacity to provide mission-critical IT-enabled services from Kenya, says Cascade Global MD, Peres Were, according to TheDailyNation.

“In previous years, the business processing and outsourcing sector in Kenya has suffered many challenges, because most serious international outsourcing companies were not willing to give the country a chance, unless we had fibre optic capacity,” she says.

However, since the cables landed last year, the sector has witnessed a lot of interest from top international companies which either want to outsource to Kenya or set-up call centres in the country.

Social media has become the new soapbox, and public conversations about companies and products have changed how customer relationship management systems (CRM) and business processes should be developed, according to a Forrester Research, says SDTimes.

The report, entitled 'Social CRM goes mainstream', suggests CRM solutions should now include technologies that support business processes for acquiring, retaining, targeting, understanding and collaborating socially with customers. Business process professionals should design their future plans around that vision, it says.

Forrester believes the social Web is forcing business process professionals to expand their thinking beyond the traditional two-way channel of communication between enterprise and customers to also include the interactions that customers have among themselves.

Today's software-as-a-service or cloud based call centre solutions offer numerous advantages over on-premises systems, including quick and easy deployment, reduced up-front capital expense, improved scalability, reduced maintenance costs and instant access to the most advanced, up-to-date call centre technologies available, reports TMCnet

Although most organisations cite these as the main reasons for their decision to migrate to a cloud-based call centre system, some also like to point to the additional benefit of reducing their carbon footprint.

One simple way organisations can reduce their carbon footprint is by migrating to cloud-based solutions, including cloud-based call centre software.