Outsourcing in South Africa is delivering valuable returns in a wide range of business processes.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is changing. It is evolving with the times and harnessing the power of digital technology to provide opportunities for businesses at all levels of the value chain. Job functions and services that had previously been kept in-house are progressively moving overseas, giving UK businesses a chance to access top talent at a more affordable price. In this article, we’ll look at some of these new roles and how the concept of outsourcing in South Africa is changing the game for workers and businesses alike.
Customer services
The mainstay of the outsourcing world remains customer service. However, the reasons businesses access it, and the value they hope to receive, are changing. Customer service has gone from being a purely cost-based exercise to being central to business strategy.
With technology creating more opportunities for engagement and hyper-personalisation, getting the customer service element right can make an enormous difference to a company’s bottom-line performance.
When done well, you improve customer retention and deepen your relationship with customers. You identify new ways in which you can add value and get to understand what your customers want, such as the products they prefer or how they want to interact with your company. This, in turn, leads to increased revenue per customer and a more loyal customer base.
Good customer service also boosts your wider reputation, helping you attract new businesses from elsewhere. Customers want to feel valued, they want the personal touch and will reward those businesses that treat them with the respect they deserve.
Those companies that have been falling short in customer service terms will suffer at all points in the value chain. They will lose customers to more proactive competitors and will struggle to maximise revenue from those who stay.
This is why many of the companies that viewed customer service outsourcing simply as a way to save money quickly reversed course in the face of public pressure.
South Africa has shifted the model of customer service. With English being widely spoken in a clear and easily understood accent, there have been none of no customer complaints that came when businesses offloaded operations to India.
It therefore offers the best of all worlds – a chance to benefit from discounted labour costs compared to your domestic workforce without sacrificing on quality and value.
Software development
South Africa is also proving to be an excellent option for businesses dealing with skills shortages. The age of digital transformation has forced businesses of all kinds to up their game in the tech department. Every business now has a website, no matter how small it is, and most businesses require some sort of software development, whether that’s building an app, CRM tool, or new web portal.
Digital adoption has gone from being a nice-to-have to something that’s almost completely unaffordable. For a first-hand example, just try living life without a smartphone. Businesses have embraced digital technology to drive down costs, improve efficiencies, identify new revenue opportunities and reduce the time to market. In short, they can be more agile, responsive, and efficient
than their competitors. Any company that does not adopt technology will find it increasingly difficult to compete.
Unfortunately, people with the skills to make this work are in short supply. Most have been snapped up by larger companies, and those software professionals who are available come at a premium cost. Small businesses often find themselves stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand, the need to compete means they can’t avoid digital technology, but the costs of transformation mean they can’t make it work.
Turning to South Africa is a way to solve that problem. South Africa’s workforce is young, diverse and above all highly tech savvy. The country has undergone its own process of digital transformation, with all the building blocks being put in place to train the digital workforce of the future. The country has become a hub for technology, with software developers offering services to clients around the world.
With labour costs being around 50 or 70% the levels in the UK, this is a great way to get people with the skills to spearhead your own digital transformation initiatives at a fraction of the price you’d expect to pay for UK-based professionals. It levels the playing field and provides businesses of all sizes access to people with the skills they need to thrive in the digital economy of the future.
Marketing and content
A workforce with a good command of English is well placed to help with marketing and content writing services. Marketing professionals in South Africa can work with your team, collaborating on campaigns of all kinds. With English as a first language, you should expect high levels of writing quality, making it a very different proposition from the outsourced content writing services on offer in other countries.
Poor levels of English mean the quality of writing was often extremely low, leading to costly rewrites. South African marketing professionals can produce a result which is every bit as good as domestic English professionals, but at a lower cost.
Marketing professionals can also be accessed to help with expansions into new territories. For example, many companies are looking to expand into South Africa as a first step in a much larger pan African expansion. The market has influences from East and West, which makes it a great way to prepare your product or service for new markets.
Having an outsourced team of local marketing professionals is a great way to lay the groundwork and give yourself the best possible chance of success.
Finance
South Africa is rapidly earning itself a reputation as a global financial hub. Johannesburg is recognised as a financial centre for the entire Southern African region. Outsourcing financial operations to South Africa can provide access to financial professionals on a highly cost-effective basis. They can offer services from managing accounts, dealing with taxes or providing more strategic financial management and planning. It’s a great option for small and medium-sized businesses that would like to gain more granular insights into the true financial performance of their company.
As business continues to evolve, the outsourcing market is changing. Companies are looking to outsource more senior positions than was previously the case. They are looking to integrate outsourced workers more closely into their domestic teams. It’s a new approach to outsourcing that moves beyond a single cost-based analysis and focuses on overall performance.
