Local call-centre industry expects to fill gaps caused by lockdowns
The call-centre industry, which in SA employs about 260,000 people, anticipates growth opportunities from international businesses after the coronavirus pandemic.
The industry has become increasingly important during the national lockdown as this is an important way to communicate with service providers. While some companies have scaled down call-centre operations, others have increased their operations to address customer needs.
The country is in a lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of coronavirus infections.
SA is one of the preferred offshore destinations for call-centre operations by some multinational companies.
The local industry anticipates new opportunities from international businesses.
Andy Searle, CEO of the industry’s representative body and trade association, Business Process Enabling SA (BPESA), says one of the major outcomes that could work in the sector’s favour after the pandemic is that many clients across the world have found the delivery by their call-centre partners badly disrupted to the extent that services have collapsed in some cases.
Those with high concentrations of delivery centres in countries such as India and the Philippines have been affected the most as shutdowns in those areas have made essential service delivery almost impossible, he said. This has resulted in some call centre traffic that would have gone to those countries coming to SA.
BPESA has 136 registered members, though not all callcentre operations in the country are part of the organisation. Of the total number employed by the local industry, 65,000 service international markets.
“With the people we have, the quality of services we offer, the exchange rate remaining in our favour as an export services sector, we have an unusual opportunity to exploit ... we don’t have to compete with our biggest competitors to win work that is now being forced to relocate,” Searle explained.
Before Covid-19 and the shutdown, the international segment of the industry was growing at a more than 22% compound annual rate, with 2019 growth at 35%.
“In fact, the sector had been on track to create 100,000 new jobs by the end of 2023, before the shutdown. The domestic market, on the other hand, was not growing as it closely tracks GDP growth, which was stagnant,” said Searle.
However, Searle said that while the industry prepared well in advance for the national lockdown, with many companies moving a lot of their workers to operate from home, the sector could shrink by as much as 45% during the shutdown and could lose at least 20,000 jobs.
But the “positive outcome from this disaster is that we have been forced to accelerate into the digital economy and new ways of working”.
This includes more of a hybrid model of working from home and working from conventional premises.
However, “we still have much to do in SA as many of our young people working in the sector don’t have access to suitable devices and networks to make working from home possible in all cases”, said Searle.