South Africa can compete with the global community at lots of things, but not at BPO or call centre outsourcing, it seems. Despite ten years of trying, we’re still a very long way behind India, the Philippines and even some African countries as an attractive destination for global companies looking to offshore their BPO or contact centre operations. Unlike many sectors of the IT industry that are location-neutral, BPO and contact centres are closely tied to many socio-economic factors in a country: crime, quality of life, cost of labour, cost of bandwidth and the overall perception by others.

Johann Kunz, MD of Fusion Outsourcing in the Cape, says South Africa is just not suited for the mass outsourced BPO market. “We don’t have the resources, we don’t have the volume and our salary and resource cost is too expensive,” he says. “But we have quality here in our agents: our command of English is a big advantage and that qualifies us to play well in the niche market such as financial services. We tend to be slightly better at sales, both inbound and outbound and upsell, while our customer service tends to be on a par with or slightly below our international competitors.”