India, the traditional hub for business process outsourcing, and the archetypal offshore call centre location, has been knocked off the top spot by South Africa. The findings are based on a study by the UK-based marketing services specialist Ion Group who commissioned research among UK marketers to rate best locations for offshore contact centres in terms of call-handling quality. While India received a smaller share of the vote — under 50 per cent in each category, South African call centers received a score of 51.1 per cent for attributes such as high-quality call handling standards, a strong technological infrastructure and linguistic capabilities. Though the Indian contact centre market has been praised for its graduate labour pool,it has now reached a point of relative maturity with escalating salaries and staff attrition rates. According to Ion Group, South Africa has recently emerged as a highly attractive option for UK and European companies that are keen to operate in a similar time-zone, with agents that share a similar cultural outlook. Graham Ede, Ion Group managing director, comments, “Increased competition has seen emerging locations such as South Africa not only able to meet these demands, but offer the advantage of having a similar time zone and culture to the UK.” There is also the clear advantage of English mother tongue, complemented by a range of European languages. South Africa benefits from lower political risk compared to many of the other popular offshore locations. Difficulties with accents and cultural differences were some of the shortcomings in India. Also with National Rail Enquiries relocating its contact centre to India, the complexities of foreign agents getting to grip with the geography of Britain have been brought to the fore. The fact that Indian service providers have to invest in costly private networks and that the use of cost-effective Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology is not permitted, may well be reducing the competitive cost advantage the country has traditionally enjoyed as new entrants into the offshore outsourcing market make their mark. Says Ion, “The governments of many Eastern European countries have for some time been working to attract investment in the outsourced contact centre market, using tax breaks and incentives as a carrot for private enterprise.

Despite this, and the obvious advantage of proximity to Western Europe and relative economic stability, our research indicates that Eastern European and former USSR nations are not yet perceived to have attained a sufficiently high standard of call handling necessary to rival their more far-flung - and cost-effective - competitors.” The wide range of languages spoken and the affinity with Western European culture may partially bridge this cost difference in the immediate, but EU enlargement will almost certainly push prices up in the long-term,” he opines. Referring to Philipppines, which is giving tough competition to India, Ion says, “labour costs in the Philippines tend to be higher than in India but high unemployment and a large pool of graduate level labour have been instrumental in suppressing attrition rates.” Latterly, however, there have been reports that the nation is adopting a sweatshop ethic, which is inevitably beginning to trickle down to the standards of its call handling, with a knock-on effect on general perceptions.

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