India, Malaysia, and the Philippines — three of Asia’s most popular offshoring destinations for contact centers rank well below Singapore and South Korea in terms of overall performance of their call centers, according to a study sponsored by call center solutions provider, Aspect Software, and conducted by Callcenters.net, a portal on call center operations. The result of the study, called Asian Contact Center Index 2006, is an overall measure of contact center performance in six selected markets in Asia. The index assesses the performance of Asia Pacific contact centers across categories including customer service, sales, revenue, operations, technology and human resources.
South Korea topped in terms of performance while Singapore was a close second. . These two countries raked in an overall index of 75 and 71 respectively, in comparison to the overall Asian Index of 67. The Philippines, Malaysia and India — the indices of all of which were below the overall Asian index, at 66,65, and 64 respectively, were close to each other but well below the two leaders in terms of performance. Thailand came sixth..
India, a favorite destination in the English-speaking West for setting up their offshore contact centers was a big disappointment in almost all aspects of call center operations. In customer service, its median first call resolution was the lowest, barring Thailand. So was its median score for percentage of calls answered within service-level target, where it was worse than almost all markets, other than Malaysia and Thailand.
If the performance was not up-to-the mark, it also fared badly in HR practices, ranking highest in terms of absenteeism and second highest in terms of agent turnover. In productivity too, India ranked quite low.
“On an average, a 600-seater call center in India, expects 60 of its employees to be absent on any given day. This 10% absenteeism greatly effects the productivity of the company, especially if you also take into the account the 20% attrition rate” says Dr. Catriona Wallace, Director, Callcentres.net.
“Attrition is a huge issue in India and only one in ten call center employees would go up to any executive position in a call center. Because of this lack of growth, only one in five people surveyed would prefer to continue to work in a call center,” she added.
Despite that, India had the highest percentage (58%) of call centers reporting increased revenue. This coupled with their tight control over cost per call — the only area where they fared better than other Asian counterparts — means they are the most profitable in the region.
The profitability among the call centers is highest in India with 64% of Indian call centers reporting profits. It surely is staggering, when compared to Thailand where only 16% of the call centers reported profits. Also, the outsourced call centers were a lot more profitable overall in comparison to the in-house call centers, as 73% of the outsourced call centers said that they made profits as compared to only 41% in-house call centers.
Technology Usage
According to the report, usage of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in India and The Philippines is high, and is expected to reach 78% and 65% penetration rates respectively over the next two years.
Compared to other Asian contact centers, India is most likely to use an Application Service Provider (ASP) as 32% of centers are currently using it, and a further 32% are considering it. The Philippines, however, is not far behind. Twenty-five percent of centers are using ASP, and a further 41% are considering the same.
Overall in Asia, CRM software is on top of the shopping list of most call centers, followed by VoIP solutions. As much as 58% of the Asian call centers use some sort of quality-monitoring system.
