Virtual Call Center Technology Platforms South Africa

Regional Market Outlook on Virtual Call Center Technology Platforms

Virtual call center is the most widely adopted technology in the call center space in the recent days. It helps companies to save the capital expenditure that automatically reduces hardware expenses, maintenance cost, IT administration pressure, technology lifecycle, and importantly, the integration procedures.

How do I adopt the home-based strategy in South Africa?

The industry has matured by witnessing the presence of strong contributors in virtual contact center space, such as Genesys, 8*8 Inc., Nice inContact in South Africa. Ideally, getting into an intermediate contract of around 1–3 years with the global service providers operating in South Africa and setting up KPIs and SLAs across Efficiency and Service Quality will be beneficial for marketers. These marketers largely prefer to compensate the service providers on a subscription-based model.

Key Insights

• Market Outlook: The contact center market was valued at USD 340 billion in 2016, which will further increase to USD 398 billion in 2020
• About 74–76% of contact center services are kept in-house and the rest 24–26 % are outsourced to third parties
• Earlier, outsourcing to low-cost countries was considered as mainstream activity for local companies. However, reverse trend of shifting operations to onshore location has been observed, due to quality issues and regulations across all the offshore destinations
• Inbound calls services account for 64.8% of the revenue in which the customer service calls alone sums up to 48% of the overall revenue

Key Technological Trends – Cloud & WebRTC

Rapid Growth of Cloud-based Contact Center Solution

• Cloud-based contact centre market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 21.3% from USD 6.15 billion in 2016 to USD 11.9 billion by 2019
• North America is leading the contact center market, however, overall adoption of cloud-based contact center has increased from 2.2% in 2008 to 11.1% in 2015

Advantage of Cloud-based Contact Center Solution

• Cost Saving: Cloud-based set up requires less capital than on-premise based solution. Under this model, there is no need to buy and maintain hardware, like phone switches, automatic call distribution & interactive voice response and less IT team to manage
• Flexibility and Scalability: Business needs and call volume are not always predictable, however, cloud-based solution allows instant ability to scale up to meet seasonal and spiky customer demand
• This solution provides the ability to have agents logged in from anywhere. This benefit allows more flexibility to company, which can save cost and improve the quality
• Rapid implementation of cloud-based contact centre has been observed in the industry

Adoption of Web Real Time (WebRTC) Customer Channel

• Video-based chat is increasingly being adopted by organizations, owing to the emergence of multi-platform consumer interaction and higher acceptance by consumers because of faster support
• WebRTC is a new technology that enables voice calling, video chats, and sharing files without use of any plugins. This technology allows consumers to bypass the costs associated with traditional telephony carriers. The adoption of this technology is surging fast, as it is convenient and flexible. It is estimated that WebRTC technology will be supporting more than 6 billion device by end of 2019
• Adoption of this channel is more in developed nations, such as North America, Western Europe, due to advanced internet infrastructure. For example, the UK foot retailer, Schuh, registered 400% greater conversion rate and 10% greater average order value for interactions involving video rather than text-based chat. Lands End, Starwood Hotels, and Amazon are early adopters of this service

Natural language search engines

• A process to integrate multichannels of a call center, so as to minimize human effort and maximize service levels. This would aid the agent to process customer query in a lesser time
• It has huge potential to be implemented in call centers, as it will reduce the handling of large data stored at multiple locations and handling of different customers by understanding the query in their natural language

Increased usage of self-service channels

• Self-service channels provide win-win situation for both − Customers and Companies. Customers get a chance to solve their problems without any human intervention, hence save time. On the other hand, for the companies, self-service channels reduce cost and offload support capacity
• By 2020, the customers will manage 90% of t relationship with the companies without even interacting with a human
• By 2020, inbound call volume are expected to stagnate, due to prominence of other channels and increasing rate of self-help services. Therefore, enterprises are resorting to investing in infrastructure that enables personalization at each touch point, making it the top investment priority for contact centre service providers

Usage of Big data and predictive analytics

• Due to technological development and rising adoption of social media platform, such as community forums, live chats, twitter, and Facebook usage have increased by 12%, 14%, 13%, and 34–38%, respectively, in the last three years
• With the huge number of data and content generation, contact center service providers are embracing big data and predicative analytics in a big way to draw meaningful insights from the data. Companies can automate systems and agent behaviour changes with right set of predicative analytics tool that can increase first call resolution, sales conversion, and customer satisfaction

KPIs and SLAs

Service Quality – KPI

Following are the KPIs determining the service quality:

• Call count and length
• Escalation count
• Risk pointers (warning counts)
• Response time
• Availability time
• Late task count
• Repetitive error counts

General SLAs

General SLAs include clauses that define the roles and responsibilities of both parties in a software contract.

• Price Agreements – Discounts and requisites
• Payment period and installments
• Limitation of liability
• Insurance requirements
• Service deliverables
• Exclusions to service agreements

Efficiency – KPI

Following are the KPIs determining the service efficiency:

• Request to delivery time period
• Tasks per staff
• Reminders and alerts handled
• Process error count
• Human error count
• Number of staffs allocated for training
• Mean Time Repair (MTTR)

SLAs on Contract Termination

Contract termination can be due to conflict of interest, default and also due to convenience reasons.

• Notice period
• Payment settlements
• Indemnification clauses
• Responsibility status
• Handover guidelines