VoIP key to call centre Industry?

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Contact centres in South Africa must embrace voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) as a means of reducing their operating costs and enhancing their competitiveness in the face of rising competition from other emerging countries.  This is according to Switch Telecom MD Greg Massel.

Call tariffs and telecom infrastructure represent some of the most significant operating costs for contact centres in South Africa, especially those that service the outbound and offshore markets, said Massel.  To compete successfully, these operations need to embrace lower VoIP services to reduce their costs.

“Although South Africa’s offshore contact centre industry has performed reasonably well over the years, it is not delivering the jobs and revenues that government and industry hoped for,” said Massel.

Frost & Sullivan, a research group, recently predicted that total number of outsourced contact seats will reach about 60,000 over the next five to seven years, falling short of the government’s goal of 100,000 in a similar time frame. According to Frost & Sullivan, the current number of outsourced seats in South Africa is estimated to be between 24,000 and 25,000.

A number of recent research surveys have highlighted the perceived high costs of South African telecommunications infrastructure as one of the major factors holding back the growth of the country’s outsourced contact centre industry.

The Frost & Sullivan says that a perception that telecom costs are high in South Africa is a major barrier to the industry’s growth. Western Cape’s economic development MEC Garth Strachan also last year singled out the cost of domestic and international communications as a major obstacle to growth for call centre and business process outsourcing industry.

According to BPeSA (Business Process enabling South Africa) Gauteng, South Africa is about 40% cheaper for inbound customer care call centres than similar operations in the UK. But the country still faces stiff competition from traditional rivals such as India and the Philippines, as well as from emerging players such as Kenya.

Driving telecom costs down by adopting VoIP is a viable strategy for companies that want to offer low prices per seat to their customers without compromising the quality of their services, said Massel. For an outbound contact centre calling land-line customers in the UK, the costs savings versus Telkom could be as much as 67%, he added. For an outbound call centre calling land-line and mobile customers in SA, the savings versus Telkom could be as much as 30%.

A contact centre that implements a VoIP solution can also enjoy substantial capex savings. Primary line rates for IDSN installations are subject to minimum 12-month contracts and installation fees of more than R30,000 per PRI (effectively R1071.44 per line or per seat).

PSTN-VoIP Gateways and PBX line cards could add another 50% to the cost. That means a 30-seat call centre could conservatively save R45,000 in capex costs by opting for pure VoIP solution. Facilities such as voice-recording are cheaper to implement on VoIP systems, leading to even more cost-savings. Massel noted that call centre outsourcing operations in South Africa can now source a secondary international telephone number on a VOIP network that allows callers to pay for the call in their local currency. Now that they can access overseas dialling from VoIP providers, contact centres that offer offshore services can effectively replace fixed-line telephony with VoIP services.

In addition to the cost-savings, VoIP offers a range of other benefits to contact centres, says Massel.  “For example, VoIP enables companies to roll out virtual contact centres where agents working from home can attend to customers as if they were sitting at a seat in the call centre. Companies can also more easily manage distributed call centres where attends at several sites attend to customer calls.”

“VoIP also enables call centres to make use of applications such as unified messaging, automated agentless outbound calling, and enhanced call routing as well as to deploy more powerful monitoring and reporting tools. Massel said that international bandwidth has been overpriced in South Africa to date, but prices are likely to fall as the first new international cables start going live this year.”

Implementation of the SAT-3 cable, Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (Eassy) and Seacom cables will drive bandwidth costs down and make VoIP even more compelling for call centres that have offshore customers. That will make the business case for VoIP even more compelling and help to drive growth in the local call centre industry.