The South African Contact Centre Community (Sacccom) will host a one-day conference in Johannesburg at the end of this month to focus on India's success as a world call centre destination.
"SA is steadily improving its positioning as a destination for offshore investments with a number of exciting reference cases emerging, spurred on by government initiatives such as the deregulation of the telecom industry," says Sacccom.
The conference will cover the importance of call centres and job creation in SA and other parts of the world, and will look at how India succeeded.
The local call centre industry has grown at about 8% per annum over the past four years and employs about 54 000 call centre agents, contributing almost 0.92% of the country's gross domestic product, says Sacccom.
"Early estimates indicate that, with appropriate focus, institutional support, and targeted government and industry interventions, an additional 100 000 jobs can be created in the call centre sub-sector by the end of 2009," it says.
Speakers at the conference include Sacccom CEO Mfanu Manyela and India's National Association of Software Services and Communication president Kiran Karnick.
Issues to be addressed include the business process outsourcing sector support strategy and a presentation of the sector's five-year plan.
Sacccom says that while SA has the potential to compete for world contact centre business, it faces challenges such as a shortage of middle management skills, higher cost of operations than key competitors, negative perceptions of operational risk, and relative difficulty of setting up new operations in SA.
The conference is open to CEOs, CIOs, industry executives, call centre managers, IT managers, sales and marketing managers, HR and training managers. To register, e-mail info@sacccom.org.za.
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