Major companies are increasingly looking to outsource their call centres to South Africa, with the country’s English premium voice quality being highlighted as one of the major drawing cards.
This is according to Andrew van Niekerk, a director of Teleforge Communications, a tier-3 voice solutions provider focused on providing carrier grade voice services to medium and large enterprises – as well as call centres.
“Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, set up a call centre in 2010 in Cape Town to service British, American and German clients. When it comes to SA call centres, most people think they are dealing with English companies due to the high calibre of English.”
While 2011 census figures reflect that English is the mother tongue of less than 5-million South Africans –placing it fourth behind Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans – about half the 53-million people in SA have a workable knowledge of the language.
Van Niekerk pointed out that the government has also been proactive and currently offers grants of as much as R88 000 for each new call centre post created – and maintained – for three years.
According to the government, these strong incentives, which were introduced in 2007, have assisted to attract more than R1.6-billion of direct investment, as well as creating at least 10 500 jobs in a country where there is a 25% rate of unemployment.
While India and the Philippines still dominate the global market for back-office services outsourcing, the industry in Africa’s second largest economy has grown 30% to 35% over each of the last five years, according to Boston-based HfS Research.
Industry data further reflects that South African call centres employ about 210 000, with 9% of those working for offshore companies.
“In the next five years we could see even further growth in the SA call centre industry, as long as costs can be constrained and quality levels remain high. It is possible that growth, per year, could top 30% to 35%.”
