UK telecommunications company TalkTalk is to invest more than R200 million in the South African call centre industry, with operations to be established in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
According to TalkTalk, the call centres will deal with the increasing volume of calls generated from the rapidly growing broadband customer base in the UK.
TalkTalk is the landline division of The Carphone Warehouse Group, one of Europe`s largest mobile retail operations. TalkTalk is "aggressively" going after the UK broadband market and claims to have about 2.4 million customers, about a third of the UK market. The company says it gives free calls to its customers and guarantees cheaper bills than the previous UK telecoms incumbent, BT.
Job creator
The news comes shortly after a South African parliamentary briefing in which the government emphasised its view that the business process outsourcing market is a key job creator and driver of economic growth. It said incentives were being developed to promote this.
TalkTalk has already announced its intention to invest into the UK broadband market in 2006 and will unbundle up to 1 000 BT exchanges over the next three years.
"We expect significant growth in our broadband subscriber base over the next two years," says Steve Rescorla, TalkTalk`s customer service director.
"We need to employ several hundred additional call centre agents to serve all those customers, and despite the fact that we are expanding our UK operations, we realised we simply wouldn`t be able to recruit and house that many people in the UK alone in such a short time frame."
Rescorla says SA was chosen as a call centre base because there is a real pool of talent that is an excellent fit with its business in terms of both skill and culture.
"South Africans have a reputation for strong empathy with UK callers and excellent customer skills. We`re confident they`ll rise to the challenge to fulfil our promise of great customer service," he says.
TalkTalk`s Johannesburg operation will be outsourced to Dimension Data subsidiary Merchants and is expected to become operational later this month after having begun a trial period from 30 January. The Cape Town operation will be managed by TalkTalk and is scheduled to go live in mid-May, with a first intake of trainees beginning 17 April.
"We chose a two-site strategy to give us access to the biggest pool of skills, as well as to minimise our risk in case of unexpected changes in the number of calls we receive," says Rescorla.
Vote of confidence
TalkTalk will initially recruit 250 people in Cape Town and a similar number in Johannesburg will also be employed.
"This is the single biggest investment into our call centre industry so far," says Luke Mills of promotional agency Calling the Cape, which facilitated the deal. "It`s a fantastic vote of confidence from the UK market."
Cape Town is already host to large call centres serving clients of UK businesses, including Barclays, the Budget group of companies, JP Morgan and Lufthansa.
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