IT and Digital Cluster Report

By Ryan Falkenberg – Originally published by Generation BPO Magazine (Issue 3 – Q2, 2025)

The IT and Digital Cluster’s focus is to help CapeBPO members more effectively service global demands, digitally.
To achieve this, the team aims to gather insights into how members currently understand and leverage digital; identify common challenges being faced; and explore industry-level solutions and a possible industry-level blueprint for digital going forward.

ln the previous reporting period, our cluster:

  1. Hosted a 3-part thought leadership webinar series:
    a. How digital workers are transforming the Contact Centre industry
    b. The changing role of human agents and what we can do to better enable them
    c. The IT Infrastructure needed for South Africa’s outsourcing industry to thrive
  2. Conducted a survey to understand the current digital capability and strategic intent within CapeBPO’s membership

Over the next 12 -18 months our cluster aims to:

  • Better understand what operators view ‘digitisation’ to mean in their businesses
  • Identify the challenges members face in meeting scale and agility demands, especially through digital channels
  • Analyse the market trends with regard to digital, and what customers expect from CapeBPO members within the next 5 years
  • Identify the current gaps, specifically in respect to infrastructure, operating models, automation and workforce enablement
  • Develop a strategic blueprint to help CapeBPO members prioritise and succeed in their digital journey.
  • Implement a reference site showcasing CapeBPOs digital capabilities

A shout out must go to those operators who have so willingly offered us insights into your digital truth, and helped guide our efforts so that we focus on the aspects that have most value to you. We really appreciate it and look forward to working with more operators so that we ensure our recommendations reflect the industry, not just a few key players. If you would like to contribute or be involved, please contact the team at CapeBPO. We would love to engage with you.

While many within CapeBPO express the view, publically, that business has never been better and the current rate of job growth in the sector will continue indefinitely, privately many acknowledge deep concerns about the future. With the rapid enhancements in Generative Al and Conversational Process Automation, powerful and highly capable virtual agents that can talk and operate at the level of human experts, are now emerging.

Limited chat and voice bots are fast becoming obsolete. Virtual agents can now be designed to effectively clarify, analyse, diagnose and resolve increasingly complex sales, service and support queries. These autonomous agents can also communicate like a human via voice, chat and email channels, and can ensure every conversation gets handled in a consistent and compliant way. This includes working with multiple systems to call up and pass data back for straight through processing.
The implications are profound. As digital self-service becomes normalised across industries, customers will increasingly demand a digital first engagement. Human contact will be sought only if digital fails, either logically or emotionally.

So how do BPOs react to this emerging reality?
Some may dismiss it as technological hype whose bubble will surely burst. As a result, they will embrace ‘safe’ forms of digital transformation such as those found within existing CX platforms where human agents are supported with improved prompting, translations and task automation.
Others will lean into digital strategically and actively disrupt themselves before they find themselves disrupted. By doing this, they’re able to turn this threat into a competitive advantage.
There are a number of benefits to taking the latter approach.

Expand market opportunities

Companies looking to improve self-service across their voice and digital channels, will likely first try to leverage existing
technologies such as chatbots and live chat via their CX platform. Basic queries will quickly be automated, and then the reality will dawn: automating context-rich, rule-heavy conversations is not that simple. Few follow scripted, decision-tree paths and most queries end up with live agents. This may lead to a greater openness to outsource conversation automation to specialists. These are companies who can work with the latest technologies and can offer the range of skills required to deliver conversation automation at scale. For those BPOs who invest early in building this specialisation, global opportunities will open up and help them differentiate from the rest.

Resource more profitably

As call volumes fluctuate, either in predictable patterns as with seasonal spikes, or unpredictable patterns like a sudden airport shutdown, BPOs are compelled to add additional capacity to meet agreed service levels. This inevitable ‘fat’ that must be built into the system can be avoided by leveraging virtual agents. These agents can instantly scale and process spiking volumes, allowing businesses to operate with a more stable group of human agents.

Divide up the work more effectively

Virtual agents can be assigned low value, time sapping parts of customer journeys, allowing human agents to focus on his value components. In outbound sales, for example, human agents can focus on making the sale and can then hand the customer to the virtual agent to walk them through the Ts and Cs, and all the follow up engagements to complete the required paperwork.

Reduce service level penalties

The trade-off facing BPOs, to over-resource and cut margins or under-resource and face penalties, can be mitigated using virtual agents. The variable call volumes can be assigned to a virtual agent, ensuring that service levels are maintained along with margins.

Capture revenue lost due to irregular spikes

Spiking volumes don’t only result in penalties, they also translate into missed revenue opportunities. By using a virtual agent to handle these calls, BPOs can capture this previously lost revenue.

Reduce staff training and improve call quality

Virtual agents can also be partnered with human agents, navigating them through live calls like a GPS navigates a driver on unknown roads. This allows inexperienced human agents to handle a wider range of call types. It also reduces post-call quality assurance demands. The resulting savings in training and support, as well as the improvement in call handling consistency and compliance makes a strong case for early adoption.

Reduce business risk

Whether we like it or not, automation will reduce the volume of assisted calls. A way to offset this risk is to proactively invest into digital capabilities that can improve staff productivity and profitability, and grow new revenue streams in conversation automation, analytics and process intelligence. While no-one has a crystal ball that accurately predicts the future, more companies in the industry are looking to embrace a digital first strategy. This kind of strategy should deliver on the growing expectation of immediacy while offering the human touch where it is most valued. Digital first leaves the call triaging and first-line support to virtual agents, while creating the time and space for human agents to focus on the conversations that really make an impact on customer loyalty and sale revenue.
How this varies across industries and use cases is still anyone’s guess, but the ones who have already started to move in this direction have the greatest probability of being around to find out.

Ryan Falkenberg is CEO of CLEVVA and the Advisory Board lead of the IT and Digital cluster.

View original article here. (pages 22-25)