SA a 'hidden gem` for call centre outsourcing

By Rodney Weidemann for Dimension Data South Africa

Johannesburg, 20 May 2004

SA is a "hidden gem" in terms of the services it can provide to companies looking to move their call centre businesses offshore.

This is the view of Ryan Powell, a Datamonitor analyst, who was discussing SA`s value proposition on the world stage for call centre outsourcing at Dimension Data`s Customer Interactive Solutions Forum 2004, held in Zambia.

"SA has numerous attributes that are highly prized by organisations wishing to outsource their call centre operations, including the facts that English is a national language, it has a Westernised culture, an inconsequential time difference in European terms, and is halfway between the US and India," said Powell.

"SA is also seen as a lower risk/higher value-added services arena, and because it doesn`t have quite the same problem as more developed nations in terms of legacy systems, it could easily leapfrog other regions through quicker adoption of new technologies."

Powell noted that despite the outcry from countries like the US about local jobs being lost to outsourcing, it is a myth that this is happening.

"At present only 2% of call centre agents are located offshore and this is expected to increase to about 5% by 2007. In effect that is only 231 800 positions out of a market of around 4.8 million agent seats."

He also pointed out what technologies are currently considered 'hot` and which fall into the 'not` bracket.

"Emerging technologies in this industry include the use of IP to blend and distribute both voice and data traffic via an IP-enabled architecture, workforce optimisation, to deliver true quality of service and self-service or speech technology, which will allow simpler call centre tasks to be automated.

"Certain technologies are also on their way out, such as traditional automatic call distributors (ACDs), which are being overtaken by IP-ACDs, diallers, which suffer both from customer resistance and regulatory issues, and traditional interactive voice response (IVR), which is being replaced by speech-enabling IVR."

IP-enabled agent positions across the Europe, Middle East and Africa region are currently sitting at about 5% of the total number of agent positions, but Powell said this is growing at a rate of 40% year-on-year.

"The beauty of this type of technology is that it enables you to scale and configure your call centre to fit in with the peaks and troughs of the business."