Last week some of my colleagues attended an event in Sydney held by a Philippine outsourcer SPi Global where the purpose was to educate Australian businesses about the benefits of outsourcing to the Philippines, namely the westernised culture, English language skills, high level of university education, customer service culture, lower wages and lower attrition to name a few...

But what was more impressive was the fact that SPi Global had set up presence in Australia to form partnerships with local companies for their contact centre and other outsourcing needs. Now this is what I call proactive!

Local presence is a classic International Business market entry strategy, where an overseas company sets up presence in the target country – this is a significant investment but brings about benefits such as having the advantage of being treated as a local company and a shorter learning curve about the local market. This is particularly useful in a country like Australia, where mate-ship and support for local businesses is strong – thus having a local presence can only do your international business good and will help differentiate you from the competition by showing you have a genuine interest in the Australian market as seen through your investment into Australia.

Whilst you may have set up local presence in Australia, it is also important to understand the market’s attitudes towards outsourcing… based on the most recent Fifth Quadrant Australian Contact Centre Outsourcing Market Report 2011, we know that 24% of organisations consider outsourcing as one of their top 10 initiatives. Organisations in Australia believe outsourcing will help them overcome challenges related to maintaining operational costs, upgrading or implementing new technology and increasing productivity … to learn more about the attitudes and perceptions of Outsourcing contact us here to order a copy of the Fifth Quadrant Australian Contact Centre Outsourcing Market Report 2011.

Last week we saw news from Convergys stating that Social Media as a customer service tool is steadily growing in the outsourcing hub of the Philippines, with their non-voice service offerings slowly seeing growth. "We do a fair amount of non-voice BPO (such as) back-office email management, chat processing, coupons processing and claims processing, among others," said Convergys president of customer management Andrea Ayers.

This is great news, considering all the hype over the last couple of years about Social Media with very low take up rates from organisations and consumers...

However, we still understand that Social Media as a channel to contact an organisation is still very low, in fact 6% of consumers across the globe have used a Social Media channel to contact an organisation in the last 3 months (2011 Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index – conducted by Fifth Quadrant).

Social Media may include many things, from social sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr through to social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Ron Jones' Social Media definition captures the phenomenon well:

"Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online."

It is important to bear in mind that although consumers are increasingly using Social Media, they tend to do so for personal reasons and not so much as a contact channel with Organisations.

Other key findings from the 2011 Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index include:

1. Social Media as a contact channel for Organisations tends to be lower across Asia than that seen in the Caribbean and Latin America region
2. Preference for using the Social Media channel is lower than actual usage of the channel (2% of consumers prefer to use the Social Media channel vs 6% that have used the Social Media channel in last 3 months)
3. Based on consumer intentions, the use of Social Media as contact channel to interact with customer service centres is not predicted to grow significantly in the next 1-2 years

If you would like more info on these results please contact Brydie murphy7@avaya.com.