Time zones growth chance for call centres

By Richard Braddell

WELLINGTON - New Zealand's $300 million-a-year call centre business could join forces with Australian operators to cover an area from the western United States to Southeast Asia, says the author of an international survey.

At present, about 10 per cent of call centres in both Australia and New Zealand have international business. But most of that is between the two countries, said Martin Conboy, the managing director of Sydney-based Call Centre Research.

But he said there was strong potential to expand international business outside the two countries. New Zealand call centres could team with their Perth counterparts to range across time zones from the US to Asia.

Mr Conboy said the Australian and New Zealand approach to call centres was ahead of that in Asia, where they were treated simply as ways to contain service delivery costs rather than as a way to deliver new technologies and services.

Regardless, call centres can have a dramatic impact on costs. On average, it costs about $300 for a salesman to visit a client and between $25 and $50 for each visit to a bank branch by a customer.

In contrast, the cost when a customer contacts a call centre is as low as $3, while for an Internet call centre, where no human contact is required, it is less than 25c per call.