Popularity of call centre option rises

Catriona Wallace. Photo / Supplied

The number of contact centre "seats" used by New Zealand organisations grew strongly last year as businesses continue to tweak their operations to take advantage of cheaper ways of interacting with customers.

There are about 29,000 staff working at 350 local contact centres, according to the latest annual survey by industry researcher callcentres.net.

Call centre seat numbers grew 6.1 per cent over the past year, but that growth rate is expected to fall to 1.3 per cent over the coming year.

"Senior executives now recognise the most cost-effective channel to market for delivering service, and also for revenue generation, is the call centre," said callcentres.net managing director Catriona Wallace.

Staff retention continues to be a major problem for businesses running call centres, although the tighter labour market as a result of the global economic crisis has encouraged more call centre workers to stick with their existing jobs.

Over the past year 31 per cent of fulltime contact centre agents left their job, compared with 35 per cent the previous year.

Contact centre budgets were cut by an average 7 per cent last year.

About 13 per cent of local contact centres are entirely outsourced while 17 per cent of in-house centres outsource some work, such as handling after-hours calls. Of the organisations that outsource call centre work, 13 per cent use overseas outsourcing service providers.

The negative customer reaction to overseas outsourcing undertaken by companies like Yellow may be having an impact on the call centre plans of other businesses.

Despite the pressure to cut budgets, there is little enthusiasm for further outsourcing of call centre work among local organisations.

Only 6 per cent of those surveyed by callcentres.net said they were planning further outsourcing over the coming year, 92 per cent said they had no plans to do so and 2 per cent were unsure.