A recent report predicts strong growth for South Africa’s outsource contact centres. While this is good news for the sector, local contact centres should focus more on profit than revenues, says Interactive Intelligence.

Interactive Intelligence’s own experience in the market supports this optimism. But at the same time, we find companies increasingly concerned about controlling costs while simultaneously improving service delivery. They are looking beyond revenues to profit, and encountering three main challenges that must be overcome to ensure profitability in future. People, processes and scalability have emerged as key hurdles in the race to financially viable yet sterling customer service that supports business’s bottom line
writes Andre le Roux.

The people question
Agents will remain the most important component of the contact centre for some time to come, and Frost and Sullivan expect the number of South African contact centre agents to double, topping 429,624 by 2019. They are also the most expensive resource within the contact centre. With high staff turnover rates and a constant challenge to ensure agents have the necessary skills to resolve customer queries, companies are urgently looking for solutions to the people problems. By investing more in agent training and support technologies, and bringing the ‘back office’ skills to bear within the contact centre, companies can resolve queries faster and more effectively. The higher the level of skills and knowledge in the contact centre, the easier it is to resolve queries and reduce call times. In fact Interactive Intelligence’s own global research has found that customers rank a knowledgeable agent as a top priority for them when dealing with a call centre. Ultimately, by empowering agents with knowledge and technology tools, the company will have fewer and shorter calls, with higher levels of customer satisfaction and greater cost efficiencies. There is no question that the profit benefits will offset the investment in up skilling and more effective contact centre tools.
Processes
Traditional processes for resolving queries are time consuming, result in duplicated effort, and increase the cost of doing business. Within these complex and often duplicated processes lies the challenge of ensuring that a consistent message and service level is delivered to customers. New approaches to workforce optimization and contact centre process management, supported by a single view of customer technologies, omnichannel functionality, and the emergence of a range of new non-voice tools, allow companies to offer faster, more effective customer service at a lower cost. This positions them to compete more effectively in a global market.
Cost-effective scalability
For most contact centres, but BPO operations in particular, the cost of unused capacity can be massive. Contact centres may have to add 100 agents for a client one day, and sit idle the next. In the past, provisioning for unexpected scaling up or down meant investing heavily in hardware, software and space. However, thanks to the widespread availability of cloud-based, pay-per-use contact centre solutions, scaling up and down can be achieved only as needed, with no wasted expenditure.
It’s clear that the future for South African contact centres looks bright, presenting opportunities for increased international outsourcing business. But in order to capitalize on the potential, contact centres need to streamline operations, work smarter, and harness advanced new technologies in order to deliver better service in a financially viable way.