The contact centre that serves Australian companies isn’t any different that the contact centre that serves other English speaking countries.  Other than some slight training necessary for the agents to understand and use the Australian dialect of English and some slight nuances in their equivalent of the ‘do not contact’ law for business-to-consumer outbound dialing, everything else is pretty much the same.

There is a slight difference in costs involved for a contact centre dialing Australian outbound processes due to the cost of the telephone lines between Australia and the Philippines.  The Philippines of course is where most of the contract centres that service the Australian market are based.  Because thus far there isn’t quite as much outbound traffic going to Australia as there is to Australia, the ‘telco’ charges are slightly higher.

Telco charges are the charges that any contract centre, in the Philippines or elsewhere, has to pay to transmit traffic over the lines that connect their country with the country they’re dialing into.  In the case of the biggest inbound market, the US, those charges are virtually negligible but in the case of a contact centre dialing Australia, a comparatively newer and smaller market, the telco charges are larger but still fall within the parameters of an easily acceptable cost in return for the other benefits of contact centre advantages for Australian companies.

Australian companies still get the same remarkable service that the Philippines contact centre is renowned for.  Filipino contact centre operators, whether it’s inbound, outbound, customer service or high-tech help desk, consumers immediately notice the courtesy, patience, neutral English accent and poise with which Filipino contact centre agent handle their responsibilities.

Contact centres in the Philippines, most of which are based in Manila, the nation’s capital, also maintain world-class facilities infrastructure.  Even a mid-sized contact centre will have over $750,000,000 worth of equipment just in its server room.  And that’s not counting the computers and software the agents use or the variety of other equipment used throughout the facility.

Today’s modern contact centre that services the Australian market is making a critical contribution to the success of Australian clients to keep operating costs low while maintaining high standards of customer dedication.  It’s a combination of better service, more service and a 30-60% cost saving that just can’t be beat.

Aussie business men and women are just as interested in keeping costs down as business people anywhere else and that’s why they’ve wholeheartedly embraced the idea of the offshore outsourced contact centre.  More and more Australian businesses are setting up a call centre to take over several of their business processes.  It seems to be working fine for them.

Australia is a very large country so they’re no strangers to the telephone and long distance communication technology.  Maybe that’s why they’ve taken so enthusiastically to the idea using an offshore outsourced contact centre.  They know that using a contact centre is just another form of delegating and that as long as their outsourced contact centre does what they’re supposed to, it really doesn’t make any difference where they’re dialing from.

Aussie businesses use the full gamut of offshore outsourced contact centre services.  They use inbound and outbound agents and those agents handle customer service, tech support, inbound and outbound telesales, customer win-back, surveys and a host of other processes that Australian clients have come to depend on for quality and value.

Contact centre services providers, most of which are based in the Philippines, have gotten accustomed to working with client companies in Australia.  For them, the only slight variation they have to make in their operational procedures is to train their operators in some of the ways that Australian English is different than American English.  That doesn’t take very long.

Any reputable contact centre uses the same, worldwide accepted best-practices for the processes they run for their clients.  That means that no matter where the contact centre of the client is, as long as it’s run professionally, the client can be assured of getting the same a similar high quality of management and reporting procedures.  Exactly what the client wants in their particular campaign is something that is determined in the initial program set-up with their call centre.

Australian business love delegating business processes to a good contact centre because it saves them lots of money and allows them to focus their energies on their core competencies.

The modern Philippines based contact centre is being more and more utilized by Australian businesses.  Australian businesses from Sydney to Perth are finding that they can substantially cut their operating costs while maintaining high levels of customer service, efficiency and accuracy in all forms of customer service and outbound and inbound telesales.  The answer is the ‘contact centre.’

As any business person knows, labor costs are the most significant expense for most business.  That’s the reason that Australian businesses like outsourcing as many of their business processes as possible to telesales and customer service call centres in the Philippines.  Labor costs in the Philippines are approximately 30-60% less in the Philippines than in Australia (depending on the exact skill set of the labor involved of course).

Another factor that makes outsourcing to a Philippines contact centre very popular is that it eliminates the necessity to allocate space and human resources to those processes ‘in-house.’  The client business can focus more resources on their core competencies instead.

Businesses invariably find that growth brings problems of scale.  Most business initially tries to run their own contact centre and handle all their customer service in-house with their own personnel.  They inevitably find, however, that it becomes a supreme hassle of hiring problems, personnel problems, technology problems and other type of problems intrinsic to running a contact centre.

Having a contact centre is important and certainly is a step in the right general direction.  But sooner or later most companies realize that they can offshore outsource it for a fraction of the price and also get a better job done too.  Once this important change in mindset and action step is taken, businesses often think, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?”

That’s why more and more businesses in Australia, all the way from Sydney to Perth to Melbourne are outsourcing their contact centre tasks to offshore service providers.  This allows these Australian companies to focus more on their core competencies and it almost invariably results in greater profits for the company too.

Having enough business to need a contact centre is a sign of healthy growth but outsourcing it is a sign of even greater wisdom.

The contact centre has become an indispensable part of progressive Australian business practice.  Although most people don’t think of ‘big business’ when they think of Australia but rather think of ‘the Outback’ and The Great Barrier Reef and Crocodile Dundee and such, the fact is that major cities in Australia have large and very dynamic business communities.  Australia is a country of great business opportunity and very progressive business thought.

Australians also feel all the competitive business pressures of businesses in any other country.  They need to control and minimize costs as much as anybody.  That’s why they’ve wholeheartedly embraced the concept of offshore outsourcing of business processes. They love the low cost but high quality service they get by outsourcing their contact centre operation offshore.

The average Australian is actually more comfortable with being contacted by a contact centre agent more so than consumers in some other developed, English speaking countries.  While Australia is a comparative latecomer in utilizing the many different processes that a contact centre is capable of doing, the number of Australian companies utilizing modern contact centre services is currently on the upswing.

The results have been very favorable too.  Australian companies which avail themselves of such contact centre processes as lead generation, outbound telesales, inbound customer service, customer win-back, outbound market surveys, and others have generally experienced excellent positive contributions to their profits.  And that’s not to mention the fact that they are able to stay competitive with foreign companies, with lower operating costs in some areas, which are competing with them for their Australian customers.

Australian companies in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and all of the other major cities in Australia are working with established contact centres in the major contact centre destinations of the world to develop contact centre processes that target their desired markets.  They like the cooperative service they get from contact centre management too.

The only new thing that contact centre agents need to learn when dealing with Australian consumers is the slightly different accent and a few conversational mannerisms that are unique to the Australian brand of English.  That’s because most contact centre agents are more familiar with the American English model.  But that’s very easily done.