Fewer people needed in call centres

South African financial institutions are following the European trend of minimising the use of people when customers need to complete basic transactions, says Merchants director Martin Dove.

Dove spoke to ITWeb following the release of the company`s latest "Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report".

Merchants is Dimension Data`s call centre solutions company, and for the past seven years has been conducting a needs survey of the booming call centre industry. In this survey, done with international research firm Synovate, 166 contact centres located in 24 countries and across five continents were polled.

"Generally speaking, financial institutions are looking at taking out the human interaction as far as possible. The trend is to move customers away from branches to the Internet, and then from there to call centres and then the use of interactive voice response and speech recognition services," Dove says.

He says the downside of such a strategy is that the financial institutions lose some of their ability to interact with their customers.

"However, for most ordinary transactions such as balance enquiries it should be acceptable," Dove says.

According to the survey findings, offshore call centres face tough challenges. Fifty percent of businesses cite staff skills over cost reduction (42%) as a primary driver of their location strategy; however, for the overwhelming majority (89%), the actual benefit of the migration remains cost reduction.

Staff issues are also highlighted as main factors that influence the eventual choice of a location once a business has chosen the offshore route. The primary issue is the availability of staff (45% of centres), followed by staff skills (35%).

Slightly over a quarter (27%) of centres highlight staff costs as an influencing factor, which again emphasises the primary challenge being placed firmly on assuring quality of service.

The report says businesses have overcome many of the technical challenges of managing a contact centre overseas, with only 28% citing data linkages and 19% citing telecommunication among their top three challenges.

"However, businesses continue to be faced with significant staff and service concerns. Over half (56%) stated quality of service, 51% cited culture of staff and 44% highlighted concern about retaining control over remote operations among their top three issues in managing a contact centre in an alternate location from their head office or regional operations," states the Merchants` survey.

Companies that choose not to outsource cite potential damage to brand (43% of businesses), risk factors too great (32%) and insufficient cost savings (22%) as factors influencing their decision. The overriding reason given by 68% of companies for not going down this route was because the function was perceived as being core to the business.