Call Center Business Featured Article

Call Center Business Growth is Brisk in South Africa, Thanks to VoIP-based Solutions

Cloud-based, VoIP-based call center businesses are still on the rise, though the growth numbers have flattened in North America and Europe as the skyrocketing numbers of first installations have slowed. In other parts of the world, however, the growth of VoIP-based contact centers that allow for remote operations are still on a meteoric rise. South Africa is one of the nations still seeing healthy growth: 10 to 15 percent per year.

Another major driver in South Africa is the high cost associated with staffing premises-based call centers and the rising prevalence of more cost-efficient self-service options that customers are using more often.  Many of these self-service solutions are built-in features of VoIP-based contact centers, allowing even small centers to offer the kind of media to customers that formerly came with only the largest premises-based solutions. Barriers to entry into the contact center arena have been lowered due to the increasing availability of next-generation VoIP solutions and the need to keep costs down, which makes moving to a monthly subscription-based contact center product more attractive, according to a recent article on South Africa’s BizCommunity.com website.

The region has become something of a hot-spot for English language call center business outsourcing as of late. Amazon and Aegis are just two of the large international players who have begun using South African call centers. British company Coracall also recently opened a call center in that country. Coracall’s CEO, Philip Lightfoot, told CNN that he looked at other international call center destinations, including India and the Philippines, but was finally lured to Durban because of its labor benefits.

Today, of course, it doesn’t matter where the contact center is physically located. Full-featured Web-based VoIP contact center solutions enable anyone with a broadband Internet connection and a headset (and the proper training, of course) to become a contact center agent, and agents can be located on the other side of the world from their customers. In essence, this means companies can run an international-based campaign essentially from a laptop computer.

The call center solutions from companies such as Voicent eliminates expensive overhead such as hardware acquisition and maintenance, automatically monitoring and managing resources to meet regulatory requirements and campaign goals: another critical element for today’s contact centers.

The call center business provider’s solution can handle thousands of simultaneous outbound and inbound calls without impacting call quality, meaning that it’s capable of supporting any sized call center. It ensures regulatory compliance by automatically measuring and adjusting the pace of outbound calls, keeping within strict federal limitations on dropped and abandoned call rates. The product eve n features a dialer that can be easily integrated into any existing database or CRM software, and can be used to record calls, log campaign statistics, and transfer calls between multi-tiered agents.

For more information about Voicent, click here.