Merchants approach to call centre outsourcing successful

Customer management specialists Merchants, has proven its approach to call centre outsourcing by showing significant growth rates at its Sandton i-Media Centre facility.

Part of the Dimension Data Group, Merchants launched its i-Media Centre officially in March this year, and has already reached the significant milestone of 100 occupied agent seats.

Says Adam Craker, Managing Director of Merchants SA, "Merchants has reached a staff complement of over 150 people in South Africa, with 13 client organisations operating various customer management functions in the call centre. This impressive growth rate is attributable to our extensive experience in call centre technology, processes and operational management as well as to our unique approach to the concept of call centre outsourcing."

The Merchants call centre outsourcing approach is referred to as the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) methodology.

For Merchants customers, the basic premise is that making the strategic decision between building a contact centre operation in-house and outsourcing this capability does not preclude owning this operation in the future.

Says Craker, "The BOT approach involves partnering with Merchants to rapidly build the required contact centre capability at the i-Media Centre in Sandton, operating the contact centre for a period of time and then transferring this capability back into the client environment. This expedites the market entry of our clients^1 new business activities by using the i-Media Centre as an incubator for a new customer management capability."

Exclusive to Merchants, this approach ensures that the client customer care facility is built using international best practices drawn from Merchants 19 years in the call centre industry. The Merchants model provides a world class technical and operational environment with proven training and recruitment methodologies.

"The Merchants value proposition can include operating the client^1s contact centre facility on an ongoing basis ensuring that world class working practices and procedures are absorbed into the daily activities," says Craker.

In South Africa, the majority of Merchants^1 clients are not building their contact and call centre capability from OEscratch, but rather operate existing facilities which they plan to improve or expand. In this case, Merchants^1 offering is to assess the current service delivery, understand the new requirements, implement the desired changes and then integrate the new, improved capability back into the client organisation.

"Merchants approach to outsourcing the call/contact centre environment is a powerful source of competitive advantage. Of greater significance is our ability to turn our competitive advantage into a competitive advantage for our clients," says Craker.