What Roles Can You Outsource to South Africa?

With a growing economy and a diverse skillset, South Africa is an excellent outsourcing option across all industries.

Author's Note

With a growing economy and a diverse skillset, South Africa is an excellent outsourcing option across all industries.

A more globalized and connected economy is encouraging businesses to look beyond their borders and work with professionals around the world. South Africa – with its low labour costs, deep talent pool, and high levels of education – represents an excellent option. Here are six job roles that can be attractive outsourcing options.

Customer service

Customer service has traditionally been the biggest outsourcing sector and this remains. After companies suffered negative PR for outsourcing call centres and other operations to non-English speaking countries, South Africa offers an attractive alternative.

Both its language and time zones are a good match for the UK. English is widely spoken as are many other African and European countries. South Africa is a diverse country with many different cultures in which many languages are spoken side by side. It is, therefore, a good customer service option for all sorts of different countries.

The cost of labor remains much lower than in Western economies and when government incentives and tax breaks are taken into account the overall cost can be on a par with any other location.

Infrastructure is good with well-equipped and resource call center operations set up to manage any requirements. With a skilled and educated staff, these options offer ideal outsourcing options allowing you to concentrate elsewhere.

The customer service sector in South Africa is also very well set up to cope with the opportunities and demands of new technologies. AI is making its presence felt through voice chat and chat bots which can automate many of the most common customer service features.

South African call centres have state-of-the-art facilities to incorporate these features switching seamlessly to human operatives when the need arises.

Marketing

South Africa’s marketing sector has enjoyed rapid growth over the past few years driven by increasing technological capabilities, changing consumer demands, a desire for foreign expansion, and digital transformation.

Improving technological infrastructure has enabled the sector to keep pace with the latest trends in digital marketing. Faster internet communications also enable better communication between multi-disciplinary and multinational teams.

Outsourcing marketing solutions to South Africa can be a great way to benefit from affordable and highly experienced professionals and bring in new talent and perspectives to your team.

They can work as an alternative to domestically based teams or more often as a supplement, bringing new skills into your business that you could not access anywhere else.

Marketing professionals are also extremely valuable for any company looking to expand. South Africa is attracting interest both in its own right, but also due to its location at the base of Africa.

South Africa’s culture is an exciting fusion of European and African which makes it a great first stop for any company looking to crack the African market. Get a foothold in South Africa and the rest of the continent may follow.

South Africa’s status as a gateway to Africa can also help. Successful marketing in new territories depends as much on local understanding of that market as on language abilities. South Africa is home to professionals across the continent with in-depth knowledge of all sorts of some of the most lucrative markets in the country. That expertise and experience can be crucial in helping you to develop effective localized marketing strategies and to transfer products and services that have been successful back home into new areas.

Financial services

South Africa’s financial sector is growing rapidly with growth in both traditional banking sectors and growing fintechs.

The sector benefits from growing investment and increasingly deep reserves of talent which can help them deliver a range of services to clients across the world. It is becoming an increasingly attractive market for all sorts of financial options including accountancy and bookkeeping as well as more proactive financial management solutions.

South Africa has a highly developed regulatory infrastructure and can meet international best practices for all types of governance. Business process outsourcing companies make a point of ensuring their operations are compliant with all global financial regulations and data protection rules such as GDPR.

The technical infrastructure is highly sophisticated with companies following the highest international cyber security standards – crucial when dealing with sensitive financial information.

IT support

South Africa’s growing IT sector coupled with its lengthy experience in customer service also makes it an attractive option for IT support. Support operations have access to highly skilled IT professionals as well as secure technical infrastructure enabling secure data pipelines to support customer needs.

This can be important when IT operatives need to take over a customer’s machine to perform routine maintenance. Having the ability to connect in that way without introducing any external cyber risks can be particularly important.

Time zones can be important in this. Office hours in South Africa are a good match for the UK and Europe. Alternatively, when working with clients in Australia or the USA, they offer a good out-of-hours option with skilled operatives on hand to provide support 24/7.

Software development

Content support

Businesses have long been looking to cut marketing budgets and content creation has often been among the first to go. However, more often than not, this can be a false economy.

Content agencies sprang up in places such as India offering cut-price content services. However, with writers having to work in their second or third languages, the quality was often extremely low. Businesses would often have to spend excessive time and money putting right poor quality content.

More recently some agencies have also sought to save money through AI. Platforms such as ChatGPT have become much more convincing. Even so, the content remains generic and hurts search engine optimization.

Despite the rise in technology content is still King and there is no substitute for the expertise of human content generators.

Even so, budgets remain tight and companies are looking for ways to save money where possible.

South Africa represents a way to do that without sacrificing the quality of the end product. South Africa has a deep and wide relent pool including highly capable content marketers with fluency in English and some other languages.

They offer a great way to produce high-quality content at a much cheaper price than their counterparts in the UK or USA. Furthermore, South Africa is a multilingual country with people often speaking two or more languages. As such it’s not only a good location for generating English content, but also translating and reshaping content to work in other markets.

Whatever sector you’re looking at – from customer service to financial management, South Africa has a wide range of options and services to choose from.

To find out more about how to successfully outsource services to South Africa download our handy guide.