Offshoring call centres and empowering women
Australasia’s most authoritative contact centre analyst Catriona Wallace, from callcentres.net, is celebrating the outcome of a conference affirming offshoring.
Wallace, well known here for her annual benchmarking report on New Zealand contacts centres, is a staunch supporter of offshoring. At the Contact Centre Institiute of New Zealand (CCiNZ) conference earlier this year she came out in favour of the often-maligned practice that sees local companies locate customer support services to the Philippines or India.
Wallace took part in a debate “Outsourced Offshoring – Doest it Empower Women?” at an Asia Pacific Breakthrough conference sponsored by the Victorian Government and wrote about it in her blog.
“I concluded the session by asking the members of the audience to reflect on their views on whether they thought outsourced offshoring empowered women, and the response was unanimously affirmative, that women in developing nations were empowered through employment opportunities provided by Australian-based organisations, and that this had a powerful positive multiplier effect reaching beyond the women into communities,” she writes.
According to Wallace, in Australia 12% of the industry is outsourced and of that only 50% is offshored - to India (26%), Philippines (10%) Malaysia (2%), an interestingly New Zealand (7%). But that number will grow as three in ten Australian organsiations have indicated that outsourcing is in their top ten business priorities in 2009-2010.
In New Zealand, Wallace estimates that 13% of contact centre work is outsourced, with only 10% of that off-shored. But it does attract headlines, in particular Yellow’s move to shift the 018 service to the Philippines. Its CEO Bruce Cotterill defends the move in the latest print edition of IT Brief: “Seamless communications technology and lower offshore labour costs make the case for partnering with an overseas provider a strong one.”
TUANZ, which also represents the contact centre industry locally, appears vehemently opposed to offshoring. In the latest entry on its contact centre blog 'Mouthpiece', contributor Megan Lacy writes about a poll on the yahooXtra home page in which more than 70% of respondents claim to avoid outsourced call centres.
“The majority of outsourced call centres are offshore, which means language difficulties, poor Kiwi pronunciation and a lack of general knowledge of New Zealand landmarks.This causes customer dissatisfaction and frustration.
I know it’s a small poll, but once again the customer is trying to tell companies something… sooner or later they will listen.On the plus side, there are now a half dozen large local companies advertising on national TV and media that their call centres are New Zealand based. Yeehaa – those companies are listening!"
Photo: Catriona Wallace with Brett Waters from RightNow Technologies during this year's CCiNZ conference.
