Leading customer interaction and communications expert, Inter-Active Technologies (IAT), was joined by top executives in the global business process services and offshoring (BPS&O) sector at the C-Level Conference, hosted in Johannesburg in September 2013, to discuss the latest industry trends and challenges.
Inter-Active Technologies Chief Executive Officer Brendan van Staaden was a keynote speaker, as he supported Inter-Active Technologies, the event lead sponsor of the conference, held at the Emoyeni Conference Centre and Estate, in Parktown, where key market trends were discussed with knowledge leaders from South Africa, Africa and the global BPO market.
"I believe the event delivered a new flavour of industry insights and was a collaborative industry-focused event rather than a customer function or market potential event. While there were a few potentials at the event, the bulk of attendees were industry-facing service providers and collaborators, and it was a platform to share ideas with peers," he explains.
The international C-level event was recorded and made available to delegates in Europe, the United States, Australia and India, in addition to knowledge executives across Africa. Here, it was established that international contact centres are seeing changes in migration of services to the cloud-on-demand and the application of multimedia customer interaction methodologies.
Van Staaden highlights the fact that the local industry is seeing similar trends but on a slightly slower scale. "The South African industry will evolve fully as we approach cloud-based contact centre and hosted multimedia applications. We have to see new trends like speech analytics taking a leading role in the new-age QA management and real-time performance management. Further developments in social media management in the contact centre and customer self-service are trends we need to be aware of and follow closely."
According to Van Staaden, the main challenges facing the South African BPO industry are labour-related issues, and the effective delivery of broadband connectivity. He reveals that Inter-Active Technologies is able to avert many labour-related challenges thanks to its ability to adapt its staffing teams accurately and adequately within the group through its own in-house staffing solutions.
"This positions us well as an independent service provider servicing our own needs, as well as the market needs. With regards to connectivity, we have established excellent professional relationships with key cellular network and fixed infrastructure operators, thereby ensuring that we are able to overcome some of the traditional bandwidth issues experienced locally," he concludes.
Notes to the editor
There are numerous photographs specific to this press release. Please visit http://media.ngage.co.za and click the Inter-Active Technologies link.
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