 INSIDE BPO |
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| SOUTH AFRICA |
| A New Location in the BPO Scene |
As companies worldwide respond to increasing cost and efficiency pressures, South Africa is fast becoming an attractive international location for business process outsourcing, predominantly for call centers and back-office processing functions. South Africa offers a cost-saving over Tier 1 destinations but more importantly presents a higher quality offering than many of the price-competitive Tier 3 destinations. More and more companies in the UK and Western Europe are exploring opportunities for outsourcing their call center operations and back-office functions to South Africa. |
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For international firms, South Africa slots in between near-shore locations such as Canada, Mexico or Eastern Europe, which offer close proximity as well as cultural affinity to domestic markets, and the more traditional outsourcing locations, such as India and the Philippines, which offer cheap labor. |
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| South Africa has many factors working in its favour, including: |
- World-class service levels of call center and back-office staff
- A broad base of management and service provider expertise, coupled with extensive financial services expertise, particularly in banking, securities, auditing and compliance, tax, asset management, insurance, mortgage and loan processing and collection
- Time-zone compatibility with Europe
- High rates of fluency in English, coupled with neutral English accents that are easily understood in Western markets
- High availability of additional language skills, such as Dutch, French and German
- A favourable exchange rate
- Strong government support that focuses on investment grants and training subsidies
- An advanced and growing telecommunications industry
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Gauteng province, where Pretoria and Johannesburg are located, is the economic hub of South Africa and the entire southern African region and has the most attractive investment climate on the African continent. The province is the gateway to doing business on the rest of continent. Although the smallest of Africa’s nine provinces, Gauteng accounts for 33% of the national gross domestic product (GDP) and 65% of fiscal revenue, and a remarkable 10% of the GDP of the entire African continent. |
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It is clear that Gauteng is South Africa’s leader in providing world-class customer care call centers and specialized financial and accounting services, across front- and back-office functions. This is underpinned by highly developed telecoms and IT infrastructures, the largest pool of English speakers and the highest literacy and skills levels in the country. |
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Gauteng is the location for long-term scalable, sustainable operations surrounded by the country’s leading multi-national companies, whilst also providing added benefits such as a long-term growth platform into Africa. |
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