Incentives lure call centres to SA

Linda EnsorPolitical Correspondent

CAPE TOWN — The government’s scheme to provide incentives to lure international companies to establish their call centres in SA had already met with a lot of success, according to a trade and industry department official.

The success achieved so far belied the scepticism which greeted the project shortly after its launch last year, trade and industry deputy director-general Tumelo Chipfupa said in an interview.

The fiscus has allocated R680m for the incentives over three years as part of government’s strategy to deal with unemployment and poverty. More…

The Big Five of the Contact Centre

Roland Whitham on the five aspects that define the nature of a good inbound contact centre: first call resolution, customer satisfaction, staff satisfaction, service level and intelligent management information

 

In my opinion inbound contact centres have their own big five, those aspects that define the very nature of a good inbound contact centre, they are: first call resolution, customer satisfaction, staff satisfaction, service level and intelligent management information.

If you have been on a game drive in one of the beautiful reserves in South Africa you will know that seeing all of the Big Five is a highlight to be remembered. You need a pretty unique set of circumstances to see lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino in one park.

The king of beasts really is first call resolution or FCR. Achieving FCR requires that the contact centre understands at a basic level the reason for customers’ calls (or any other contact) and has been able to design the business processes and coordinate the supporting resources in a manner that allows for an Agent to resolve the customers query without the need for a further call. Simple? Not really. I know of very few call centres in South Africa that measure FCR consistently and measure it from the customer’s perspective. A closed query on a CRM application is not necessarily a resolved query nor is it necessarily a satisfied customer! Ask any customer who has experienced being given an alternate telephone number to call within the same organisation whether they experienced FCR! Realistically one has to have limits to what the contact centre can and should try to achieve, and unfortunately very often these limits are dictated not by will or ability but by budget, but at least through this measure one is able to impact significantly on customer retention and the costs of doing business. More…

Red tape costs jobs

Call centre jobs target off track due to red tape

An ambitious goal for the call centre industry to create 100000 jobs by next year is unlikely to be met because the government has not done enough to turn that dream into reality.

Too little action and too much bureaucracy is suppressing the industry and letting rival countries win international call centre contracts, says a report by research house Frost & Sullivan.

Although the industry was enjoying some growth, it would probably reach 60000 jobs within seven years rather than achieve the government’s goal, said analyst Spiwe Chireka.

“The planned growth is unlikely to be realised under the current circumstances,” she said, as the government’s stated support for the industry did not translate into efficient action.

Its efforts were also slow, which frustrated investors into taking their operations elsewhere. Set-up and running costs were also higher due to higher wages in SA than in rival countries. “Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya are making headway into the offshore contact centre space,” Chireka said.

“Kenya has made large investments in its telecommunications infrastructure and is looking to have a world-class network by 2015.

“With this increasing competition, SA’s dominance as an offshore destination for contact centres in Africa may be under threat.”

SA touts its attractions as good language capabilities, favourable time zones, advanced financial services and strong government support, but investors were not necessarily looking for those any more.

Language and time zones had become irrelevant as most offshore destinations operated 24-hour centres and had large English speaking populations.

There were two critical factors to resolve, she said. First, SA must invest in skills training to keep the industry fuelled and stop the high attrition rate caused by job-hopping.

Second, independent research should be conducted into the cost of telecoms services, which are regularly condemned for being among the highest in the world.

If the costs were out of kilter, operators must be urged to reduce their fees or justify their costs to potential investors, Chireka said.

In the past few years the number of call centres had grown significantly from 450 in 2004 to more than 1300 last year, and the number of foreign jobs served from SA was between 24000 and 25000.

The jobs outsourced most frequently by US and UK companies were information technology (IT) and contact centre services.

However, SA’s IT and contact centre skills were limited, which is a major hindrance to its success, Chireka said.

By: Lesley Stones,
Source: Business Day

Self-Service becoming a way of life for South African consumers

South African companies that want to remain competitive in a market where consumers are hungry for fast, convenient service need to offer easy-to-use self-service tools that allow customers to help themselves at their leisure.

Local consumers have a love affair with self-service that dates back to the introduction of automatic teller machines by banks in the 1980s, says John Ziniades, CEO of Self-Service consulting and integration specialist, Consology.

Since then, self-service applications have evolved in leaps and bounds with the financial services and telecommunications industries leading the way.

“Self-service is transforming other industries as well: airports offer hassle-free e-ticketing, cinemas allow patrons to buy tickets from vending machines and consumers buy cellphone airtime through interactive voice response units,” says Ziniades.

“In many industries, self-service options that were once a nice-to-have or a competitive edge have simply become a ticket to play. Most consumers today wouldn\’t even think about joining a bank that doesn\’t have an ATM network and a solid Internet banking platform. Expect self-service to become as central in many other industries over the next few years.”

Ziniades says that the simple explanation for the rise of self-service is that no one likes standing in queues or holding for a call centre operator to carry out a transaction

A recent survey conducted for NCR Corp. by Opinion Research Corp in the US found that consumers there estimate that they spend two days every year waiting in line for service. Little wonder, then, that 40% of the respondents to the survey said they were very willing to use self-service kiosks or other self-service devices to reduce time wasted waiting for service. More than 40% chose one supplier over another because it offered Self-Service options.

Says Ziniades: “Self-service is clearly becoming a convenience, like the mobile phone or email, that most consumers can\’t imagine doing without. The next phase in the development of self-service is Web-based online self-service applications that make life even easier for customers.”

Online self-service systems benefit consumers by giving them the freedom to interact and transact with the companies they do business with at any time of any day: they can pay bills, research product and service offerings, apply for services, initiate bill disputes, check and change account information, initiate and track support requests, and more, all from their desks at work or at home.

Companies will gradually Web enable their back-end systems allowing them to reach their customers with a consistent set of services across a range of channels – web, mobile, kiosks and call centres.

Concludes Ziniades: “The good news is that self-service benefits companies as much it does their customers. Using the Web as a channel for customer self-service offers companies tangible ROI by helping them to improve customer loyalty, deflect calls from their call centres, automate bill dispute processes, speed up collection of payments and make significant cost savings on paper and postage.”

“Customers are fed up with long queues and poor call centre service, and demand quick access to service, visibility into their relationships with suppliers and easy ways to transact. Self-service is becoming a business essential.

Source: Balancing Act Africa

South Africa’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Sector Standards released

The requirements of the Generic standards are intended to be applicable to all BPO&O organisations, regardless of type, size and products or services provided.