Call centres shun outbound agents

Networking giant, Cisco is the dominant contact centre products vendor in the South African market, the survey discovered. The study asked the respondents which outbound dialler product they are using to provide outbound campaigns in their contact centres.

The routing of inbound calls to agents

On which automatic call distributor or private branch exchange product they are using for the routing of inbound calls to agents, most contact centres said they are unsure. Nevertheless, aside from this the uncertain ones, Cisco on the whole came out tops with 19.02%, followed by Avaya, which attracted 16.08%.

Dinat notes that the figures showing that Cisco and Avaya have the largest PABX/contact centre market share in SA confirms international PABX/contact centre market share technology. “Both are strong contenders in the inbound contact centre market, however Cisco places seventh in the North American outbound dialler market,” he notes.

Dinat as well states that Avaya and Cisco seem to have hit the winning PABX product selling strategy, not just locally, however worldwide. “The channel to market is through specialised large IT solutions providers, who not only sell telecommunications equipment, yet also a variety of other products and solutions, including data centre solutions, network integration, operations management, security solutions, etc.”

He as well points out that South African call centres are relatively small, and that the average call centre employs about 70 agents. “In this environment, for a company that uses an Avaya or Cisco PABX for the back-office, it is relatively simple to deploy call centre functionality as an add-on feature should the need arise to provide customer service.”