Published on the 14/07/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
When Barry Cottrill lost one of his biggest call centre customers it prompted a rethink of the sorts of services he could offer – and spawned the Contact Centre Hotel…
It’s not the first contact-centre-on-demand service – giants such as Optus and Salmat offer similar pop up propositions to support organisations through their call centre peaks and troughs. The challenge for all local contact centres however is the continued rise of cloud, outsourced and offshored alternatives.
According to Ibis World, although the Australian call centre market is a $2 billion concern – it is shrinking 0.5 percent each year as more and more work goes offshore. At the same time the demand for cloud-based contact centres is rising rapidly across Asia Pacific according to analyst Frost & Sullivan, making bricks and mortar facilities where people actually gather, increasingly redundant.
Earlier this month Telstra confirmed it was closing a Perth-based call centre and offshoring roles to the Philippines impacting over 300 local workers. It outsourced 400 contact centre roles in October last year, many again to the Philippines. Online adverts refer to Filipino workers being available for just $4 an hour – it’s simple economics for many enterprises.
Cottrill seems unfazed. He has been in the contact centre game for 17 years, and operates a 280-seat centre on Sydney’s mid north shore. His largest client was a major bank which had 150 seats in the centre, only to then pull the plug.
He was already aware of the ebbs and flows that exist for enterprise call centres as they respond to seasonal or campaign needs. He himself had to take on a lease for a building in Parramatta when demand suddenly rose, but understood that sort of commitment was too pricey and challenging for many businesses.
But with sudden excess capacity after the bank bailed, Cottrill decided to offer an on-demand contact centre. Dubbed the Contact Centre Hotel, companies can take out contracts for a month at a time, for between five and 200 people, starting at $100 per seat, which includes a workstation, telephony, access to the Genesys platform, and the facility’s meeting rooms.
Companies can bring their own call centre staff, or recruit them through the Contact Centre Hotel; but the key economic issue remains – they won’t cost $4 an hour.
