Why Al won't replace Africa's call centre jobs

Contact centres are booming on the continent despite the rise of artificial intelligence. As it turns out, people want the human touch.

- By Dominique Olivier

When I was in my second year of varsity, I spent six months working the night shift in a call centre in the Cape Town CBD.

It sounded like a great idea on paper: I would be answering incoming phone calls for a large German airline (in German). How exciting, I thought somewhat naively, I'm going to help people to book their holidays all over the world.

It was only after I started the job that I realised the truth about call centres and the people who phone them. No happy Germans were going to call me to book flights for them. The people who were phoning were the ones who had run into a problem they couldn't solve. They couldn't reschedule a return flight, or their luggage had been lost, or their connecting flight had been cancelled.

In most instances, these were problems that I, a 19-year-old student sitting in an office in Cape Town, could not solve. Instead, my job was to deescalate the situation as much as possible.

People phoned in an absolute rage and I explained to them why the airline couldn't help them in as nice a way as possible, until they resigned themselves to their fate and hung up. If I did my job well enough, they would end the call slightly less angry than they started it.

I thought about this story when the City of Cape Town announced the opening of a brand-new call centre by TP Group (formerly Teleperformance), one of the largest business process outsourcing (BPO) firms in the world. The centre will seat 3,500 staff and there are plans to grow this to 10,000 by the end of 2025.