The Paris-headquartered customer experience company, The Webhelp Group, will make a "significant inward investment" in South Africa as it opens up operations here that are expected to create 1 000 new jobs.
The company will open a 7 500 m2 facility in Cape Town, and a 4 500 m2 site in Johannesburg this week, it says in a statement. This follows its signing of a deal with an unnamed telecommunications company.
Business Process Enabling SA hopes to add a total of 5 000 new jobs to the business processing outsourcing sector this year. In May, it said it was on track to add a total of about 30 000 new jobs by 2016, based on the progress the Cape hub has made.
Home advantage
The South African operation will be known as Webhelp South Africa and it aims to recruit 1 000 people in the country over the next 12 months and is actively tendering for business. "The South African venture will give the company the ability to service international contracts, operating a blended onshore and offshore model from the site," it says.
Craig Gibson will join Webhelp SA as CEO. He has, during his 20-year career, been responsible for establishing Vodacom's retail presence in South Africa and growing Ernst &Young's JD Edwards enterprise resource planning practice.
Gibson says: "South Africa successfully delivers BPO services to the domestic markets of Australia and the UK. The language and culture of these countries is closely matched, enabling us to offer a far higher standard of customer service than some traditional BPO markets such as India and the Philippines."
Developing the business
David Turner, CEO of Webhelp UK, says the move "represents a significant milestone in the continued development of our business, by giving us the ability to support our customers across multiple geographies, and is complementary to our existing English language, eastern European, nearshore locations.
"We have seen a trend over the last 12 to 18 months of organisations repatriating work from other offshore locations such as India and the Philippines as a result of poor customer experience.
"All of our research tells us that SA can deliver an equivalent customer experience to the UK for certain processes. We firmly believe that our UK, Romanian and South Africa capability gives us the best possible blend of off, near and onshore capabilities."
The Webhelp Group has revenue of more than EUR370 million and 35 centres globally serving more than 100 clients across the world.
Ovum industry analyst Peter Ryan says South Africa is "particularly attractive because, alongside a stable regulatory environment, there is a talented workforce with high standards of customer experience knowledge".
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