Business Day (Johannesburg)
March 22, 2007
Posted to the web March 22, 2007
Lesley Stones
Johannesburg
A TRAINING scheme has been launched to grow the pool of quality employees to keep pace with rapid growth in SA’s call-centre industry. The aim is to ensure high standards of personnel are maintained, as quality of the local staff is touted as an attraction to persuade foreign firms to base call centres or business-process outsourcing operations in SA.
Existing staff or people wanting to join the industry will be able to take six-month courses to gain national certificates approved by the services sector education and training authority (Seta) and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA).
The Seta has made bursaries available for companies that put their staff through the training.
The Dialogue Group has put forward 89 staff for accreditation. MD David Drew says the company’s phenomenal growth from 30 staff to more than 1700 in three years means more people have to be developed to fill vacancies in the industry.
“To maintain SA’s competitive positioning in a fiercely contested global industry, it is imperative that we establish a solid foundation of learning, standards and accreditation,” says Drew.
Overall, the industry employs about 54000 people, mainly in the urban centres of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. More than 360 centres employ 35000 agents in Johannesburg.
Over the past two years some centres have doubled capacity and created 2000 new jobs to handle back-office administration, document processing, logistics and queries for the hospitality and financial services sectors.
The need for better training and more staff to support growth is backed up by research showing a smaller percentage of calls are resolved by the first call than in previous years.
In 2005, about 82% of queries were answered in the initial call. But now only 69% of callers go away happy after just one call. After surveying 403 centres in 42 countries, the conclusion is that managers must extract greater productivity and effectiveness, says report editor, Cara Diemont.
Unresolved calls frustrate customers and cost organisations money. If companies improve call resolution and agent utilisation, the effectiveness can be substantially improved, she says.
Automating some processes now handled by people is a top priority for 55% of call centres. Voice recognition technologies and other self-service techniques are increasingly common but so far only 13,5% use speech recognition, while a quarter plan to implement it.
The research by Dimension Data shows organisations spend $5000 a month on every call-centre agent, and with an estimated 6,5-million agents working worldwide, their investment tops $33bn a year.
Local call centres have a chance to be recognised at the annual Contact Centre World Awards in Los Angeles. Winners of the local Business Process Outsourcing Awards, staged by Business Process Enabling SA, will be entered in the global contest.
“As SA moves aggressively to compete as a global offshore outsourcing destination, we believe the time is right to benchmark our skills against the best in the world,” says Mfanu Mfayela, CEO of Business Process Enabling SA.
Last week, Mfayela was among delegates from the sector who met companies in New York, Chicago and Detroit to encourage them to base their offshore activities in SA. The US accounts for more than 60% of contracts that go to foreign countries.
“Our message to investors is that SA provides value for money,” Mfayela says.
Local operators must compare their delivery and quality standards with European countries rather than with the cheaper destinations of India and the Philippines, mainly because telecoms costs in SA are too high to compete on a cost basis. Instead, they have to promise superior quality, and be able to argue that 95% of first-time calls are resolved in SA, against India’s 66%.
“The growth we are witnessing is very encouraging and is a real indication that we have the local capacity and capability to accommodate large outsource contracts from international companies,” says Keryn House, CEO of ContactinGauteng, a regional industry body.
Trade and Industry Minister Mandisi Mpahlwa led the mission, and Telkom, Dimension Data and Business Connexion were also on the trip.
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The global business process outsourcing sector is tipped to grow 50% a year for five years, and the trade and industry department has budgeted R1bn in investment incentives to lure international contracts to SA.
An incentive plan launched last week aims to generate sufficient business to create 100000 new jobs by 2009 and attract $175m in foreign investment.
The incentives include training grants of up to R60000 for each call-centre seat, with a seat providing up to three jobs if a company runs shifts for a 24-hour operation.
