Offshoring good option for repetitive tasks

Despite a trend by Australian businesses to retain customer service functions in Australia, the trend toward offshoring low-level, repetitive tasks is likely to continue.

callcentres.net director Dr Catriona Wallace said most Australian contact centres have a lower staff turnover, and their staff are better educated and encounter fewer linguistic hurdles (the most common problem levelled at offshore centres) but there simply are not enough people for the Australian market. In a full job market Wallace says it is unlikely that many Australians will want to do the simple and lower-paid work.

“By offshoring, not the premium service work but the high-volume transactional work, then the Australian contact centre job will be escalated to being a more sophisticated, problem-solving, relationship-based service work,” she said. “This makes for more interesting and probably higher-paid work.” Wallace predicts more work for Australian companies will go to the Philippines, where the risk of a query being lost in translation is low.

Originally published in Callcentres.net