The rapid growth of call centres in South Africa was highlighted by a call centre benchmarking report published this month. The report is a special South African supplement produced as part of the recent international survey, one of the largest ever undertaken by The Merchants Group.
The main survey contains analysis of 205 participating call centres from UK, Continental Europe, USA, South Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia and Australia. This breaks down to over 26,000 seats, over 368 million inbound telephone calls per annum, over 52 million outbound telephone calls per annum, 215 million consumer customers served and 14 million business customers served.
Following a survey of 28 South African call centres 75% reported growth rates of over 20%. As well as showing rapid growth, more than 43% of them are planning to develop into multi-media communication centres within the next year. This compares with 23% for the international average.
"We have produced a report that will enable call centres to benchmark their operations against their individual industry standards. It is a comprehensive survey covering all aspects of call centre strategy, personnel, technology and operations," says Andrew Briggs, author of the report. "We feel this is an important document and will benefit the industry immensely."
A key finding of the SA report is that many call centres have been set up with a cost reduction focus, especially in the financial services sector. This can be clearly seen in the current migration from branch servicing to call centre servicing in the retail banking and life insurance markets.
It is expected that, as these call centres begin to focus on external competition, customer retention will become the primary focus. South African organisations are also beginning to see the call centre as a direct channel to market, which can be used to win new customers
Other key points from the report were:
. 86% of SA call centres are customer service operations.
. 71.2% of calls are answered by a human agent within 10 seconds.
. On average a call is answered in 31.5 seconds by a human agent.
. 9.6% of calls are abandoned in SA compared to a survey average of 6.6%.
. Only 29% of SA call centres use VPS/IVR/Voicemail to take messages from customers
. Only 21% of SA call centres use VPS/IVR to interact with customers without human interaction
. SA call centres have 7.2% agent absenteeism compared to 5.6% for the survey average.
. Only 75% of SA call centres provide telephone communication skills to new recruits.
. 21% of South African call centres evaluated outsourcing.
Established in the UK in 1981 and with a strong SA presence, The Merchants Group is focused on bringing people, technology and channels together to build more profitable customer relationships through the effective use of call and communication centres.
Merchants are in the process of building their own communication centre in Johannesburg, which will provide local and international call centre managed services in a number of languages. This state of the art communication centre handling phone, Internet, e-mail and fax will leverage the latest technology and call centre operating practise.
The Merchants Group forms a key part of Dimension Data`s global CRM capability. Dimension Data defines CRM as the acquisition and intelligent application of customer knowledge across the organisation to maximise mutual value. The Dimension Data approach to CRM is both practical and commercial, with a focus on delivering value on an ongoing basis to client organisations and ultimately their customers.
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