Gauteng has 60 percent of South Africa’s
call or contact center operations and anticipates that in the
next six months it will grow a further 40 percent and double
within the next two years. A call center just deals with
telephone queries, but a contact center copes with email
queries too.
It has become a primary job creator. Those
who are particularly sought after are people who are patient,
have a good telephone voice, clear accent and can speak more
than one language.
Jamie Wishart of big UK call center
operators Sykes, which has outsourced considerable work to
South Africa say they like working here because there is a
“skilled and educated resource base and a culture of
assistance and support in South Africa.
Offshore Call Center work is relatively
well paid and so we have agents with ambition who consider
their job a career rather than a stop gap. All senior
management has worked the phones.
“South Africa can deliver more than 11
languages, and teams of 100+ are easily attainable.” He says
too that South Africa has low rates of absenteeism, around 10
percent and rates of attrition at less than half of that which
makes it a very attractive location for foreign investors.
Lorraine Tshuna (23) works in a
Johannesburg call center for Standard Bank and has been
working in the call center industry for close to two years.
She says she loves working in call centers because it gives
her an opportunity to help people: “I love giving people
service and resolving their concerns, when I put the phone
down I have a smile on my face.”
She concedes that she gets difficult
callers too, “but when they phone in you have to do your best,
we have a saying that you have to turn an angry customer into
a person who gives you a smile – even though it’s across phone
lines. I’ve learnt a lot about myself in this job; it’s nice
to treat others with respect because you often get that in
return.
“It has shown me the value of patience and
this job makes you very confident, it is a real self esteem
boosting career.”
It is attitudes like Lorraine’s that are
making Gauteng one of the most sought after location for call
centers in the world. Georgeson Shareholder, a global investor
relations company, as an example, outsourced its contact
center contract with a SA operator to track down missing
shareholders. The company has 200m shareholders worldwide.
The Johannesburg based contact center hired
50 workers to complete this task. David Bailes, European CEO
of Georgeson said that “by outsourcing labor intensive
operations to our South African subsidiary we are able to
maintain quality cost effective service delivery to our
clients while increasing operational capacity.”
Because call center work is high pressure,
salaries are good and companies go out of their way to create
a good team environment with lots of fun activities. The
skills call center agents receive also make them expert in the
field they are in, which makes them highly marketable for
career advancement.
Ronnie Tonkin of ABSA which has a large
call center that services the US market says that good call
center agents are – “highly sought after, especially those who
can produce reports.”
The industry conducts massive ongoing
training a lot of which is fun. At Absa as an example, those
who work on the US TransUnion account have a training program
that helps them understand American phrases and terminology, “
a lot of which comes from baseball terms,” Tonkin says, “for
example, when say you something is a ‘ballpark’ figure, or in
dating saying you ‘made it to first base.’”
The final word is Lorraine’s: “If you’re
thinking about call center work I’d say go for it, it’s high
energy, motivated work, and you come across wonderful people
on the phone and among your team. It’s pressured, but it
leaves you with a great sense of personal fulfillment.”
