Heed the call
High telecom prices and a lack of skills are two of the challenges that limit SA’s potential to capture a larger slice of the global call centre and business process outsourcing (BPO) market, say industry players.
“SA can fulfil a need specifically as a high-quality spill-over or complementary destination for companies that already have established in-house or offshore operations,” says Craig Gibson, GM of the Vodacom operation for Merchants SA.
Though cost is still the number one driver for companies to outsource offshore, it is the quality of the customer interactions that comes next, according to a survey by Dimension Data and The Economist in the US.
“SA’s position for inward investment in contact centres and offshoring is very niche. But the country can address only certain economies of volume, such as the business that would be coming out of smaller geographies like Europe or the UK.
To that extent, it will not find success in using a ‘shotgun’ approach to attracting business into the country.
“So this puts the country almost on a knife edge with regard to its value proposition to the rest of the world.”
He argues that the only way SA can capitalise fully on its value proposition is if government and industry bodies both invest time and resources into skills development and make a concerted effort to market SA internationally.
“In the key commercial drivers of offshoring, SA lags behind countries such as India or the Philippines.”
Migration to VoIP
Another challenge is the adoption of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
Migration to IP telephony will streamline contact centre operations, says Orion Telecom MD Jacques du Toit. But adoption has been slow in SA because it is an expensive route to take.
“Of the two types of IP-based infra structure, open source and proprietary, open source is much cheaper.” But corporates generally avoid it, so price remains an inhibiting factor.
“But the benefits and extended services available with IP telephony may well outweigh the cost factor. The big advantage is that it’s a one-box solution.”
Another big challenge is the cost of proprietary call centre packages, which can cost a small fortune to set up. But these open source offerings are a cost effective way of achieving a similar result, says Rory Joffe, CEO of Superset Technology Integration, which is an integrator of such systems across Africa.
Superset, which implements the open source Asterisk PABX software, recently made seven changes to the core Asterisk code in one month. These were then incorporated globally into the Asterisk package, which is one of the major open source solutions for such systems.
Joffe says software like Asterisk, properly supported and serviced, gives customers features functionally for a fraction of the price. “Just over 30% of the US market is now using VoIP and not legacy PABX systems,” he says.
“Africa is an attractive market for VoIP with little or no telecom infrastructure,” he adds. “We are using this technology in Africa to do country-wide deployments across satellite networks. We are also using it in SA to do country-wide deployments connecting companies with over 20 branches to each other via ADSL.”
Intelligent relationships
Today contact centres are intelligent enough to enable agents to recognise callers by name, and give them tools and techniques to facilitate more efficiency when answering and making calls, says Interactive Intelligence regional sales manager for UK and Africa Dave Paulding. “But the possibilities of an intelligent contact centre far surpass simple caller name identification and other practices that are commonplace today.
“In the future, contact centres will have the potential to give details of a caller’s buying history, preferences, historical patterns, geography, culture, account status, interests, acceptance or declination of past offers. Ultimately, using technology known as Analytics, contact centres will even be able to detect a customer’s mood, monitor an agent’s tone and react to key words for security purposes.”
These intelligent contact centres of the future will be technology driven. “Instead of relying on a well-trained agent, the technology drives the process, which means there is less reliance on the agent’s skills and judgment. Agent training requirements are reduced, and the effect of agent turnover is eased.
“Secondly, the customer’s experience will be dramatically improved because he or she is presented with appropriate information and choices, unburdened by options that are often irrelevant. These factors will ultimately mean that contact centres will shift from being cost centres to profit centres in an organisation.”
More CRM synergy needed
Though the link between customer relationship management (CRM) and contact centres should be more than apparent, the lack of synergy between them is costing companies millions in lost revenue, says Softline ACCPAC strategic sales director Keith Fenner.
“Even though many companies collect customer data and invest heavily in marketing campaigns to entice customers to make contact, many of them fail to use the data they already have to provide the same individualised customer care, to which online clients are accustomed, over the telephone. This is a wasted opportunity.”
He says contact centres are not just a single application, but represent multiple technologies that support customer contacts across numerous channels. At the core of their infrastructure is interaction software that provides a framework for managing multichannel transactions.
“This is where companies should be using their CRM applications to provide the same level of interactive customer service that consumers get online. This would make a huge difference to customers who phone in,” he says.
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