Australian Research Supports Keeping Call Center Operations at Home
August 24, 2007
The past decade has seen many a contact center job sent overseas as organizations elected to offshore their operations, either by establishing a second location to support its business functions, or outsourcing the activities to an overseas vendor. The trend for offshoring contact center operations has slowed somewhat over the past few years, but still remains an attractive option for companies.
Many organizations viewed the offshoring model as the perfect way to trim expenses; after all the contact center has proven to be one of the largest drain on capital resources, without a direct return or link to driving revenues. Many overseas locations offered lower operating costs and a skilled and educated labor pool willing to work for much less than their domestic counterparts.
However, when companies elect to send their operations overseas, the domestic operations suffer, leaving many employees without jobs and hurting overall corporate moral. Such events also tend to spark negative press attention and customer frustration.
Motor insurer Budget Direct made the bold move to ignore the promises of offshoring and elected to retain its contact centers within Australia. The company found that the majority of its customers support its decision to do so.
The company released the findings of a poll that shows that 84 percent of respondents prefer contact centers to be located in the country because they dislike dealing with offshore operators. Budget Direct recently invested $20 million in setting up two new contact centers in Queensland.
Budget Direct’s Gerry O’Shaughnessy noted that the company’s customers want to deal with people that drive the same types of cars and deal with the same types of conditions that they encounter on a daily basis. Struggling with the semantics of a language can be frustrating when consumers need information about a product.
The results of this poll coincide with another study undertaken by IT company Unisys as part of its Security Index. Unisys found that Australians are increasingly concerned about the security of their private data handed over to outsourced companies.
The study also revealed that a significant number of Australian citizens are unaware of the implications of outsourcing and another 43 percent said that while they were aware of outsourcing, they do not recall ever being informed their information might be outsourced.
In its research, Unisys also found that Australians overwhelmingly support the implementation of stricter controls to protect their personal information when it is provided to third parties as part of outsourcing agreements.
Unisys Asia Pacific vice-president and general manager Andrew Barkla highlighted that the research showed that when it came to the security of personal information in relation to outsourcing services, there was a significant gap between consumers' perceptions and reality. Barkla encouraged organizations that do outsource functions to better communicate with customers about how they plan to keep their information safe.
