NelsonHall recently attended a conference hosted by BPeSA ("Business Process enabling South Africa) promoting South Africa as a destination of choice for BPO.

In the last two years WNS, Capita, Serco and WebHelp have all acquired contact center capabilities in the country.

An important contributory factor to organizations setting up BPO or captive centers in South Africa is generous government incentives. Other factors include:

· High quality spoken English; the clarity of voice and acceptability of the South African accent in both the U.K. and Australia

· The affinity of culture, including common sports such as cricket and rugby

· An innate friendliness and a natural attitude towards customer service; in particular, clients value the ability of customer service agents to go off-script in conversations that may have opportunities around revenue optimization

· Contact center work is perceived by agents to offer a worthwhile career

· The time zone compatibility between South Africa and the U.K.

It has become increasingly common for channels such as webchat and Twitter being used to help customer interactions become more complex and demanding. These types of interaction require a well-educated agent workforce, and a critical ability to make subtle judgments and to work 'off script' to achieve that nirvana of great customer experience management that reduces churn and increases cross and up-sell. This is relevant for clients where brand protection and revenue optimization is more important than providing the lowest cost service.

All this is meaningless without service quality, of course. And BPO operators we spoke to are discovering that work they have migrated from the U.K. to South Africa is matching quality levels of the onshore service. South Africa thus offers 'onshore-equivalent' voice services.

We met some experienced and top-quality local senior management of BPOs and captives, also some experienced entrepreneurs looking to build new BPO ventures in the country. Senior management talent is not an issue.