Orange Business Services in South Africa has taken its partnership with Genesys to the next level, with the award of ‘Gold PureCloud Partnership’ status, building on the business’s Gold status in EMEA and its global expertise in cloud and managed contact centre solutions.
From July 2019, Genesys PureCloud has been Orange Business Services’ flagship contact centre offering in South Africa and the Sub Saharan region, delivered with the support of the local Genesys team, and backed by the global resources and expertise of Orange Business Services.
‘Gold’ represents the top partnership status for Genesys – a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for contact centres infrastructure, worldwide, and Contact Centre-as-a-Service, North America.
And according to Gartner research (the future of the contact centre), by 2022, contact-centre-as-a-service will be the preferred adoption model in 50% of contact centres, up from approximately 10% in 2019. By 2023, customers will prefer to use speech interfaces to initiate 70% of self-service customer interactions, rising from 40% in 2019. By 2025, customer service organizations that embed AI in their multichannel customer engagement platform will elevate operational efficiency by 25%.
The timing is right for South Africa as new cloud services and adoption continue to gather momentum, especially among multinational enterprise customers and larger BPO outsourcing companies, with a concentration in key vertical industries such as BFSI (banking financial services and insurance) and T&L (transport and logistics).
The new gold partnership status builds and develops Orange Business Services’ existing solutions portfolio as part of a diversification program in South Africa, adding value on top of the well-established global network and connectivity services that the business provides to a range of enterprise customers across the country and sub-Saharan Africa. The introduction of Genesys PureCloud aligns with Orange Business Services’ strategy of deploying best of breed, cloud-based solutions for its customers in one of its key growth regions.
The benefits of cloud in terms of cost, efficiencies, speed and flexibility are clear and this is driving the growing appetite in South Africa across the enterprise market for cloud services – and the banking sector is actively responding with new cloud-based solutions and apps such as contact centre services in the cloud.
More broadly, digital business transformation with all its benefits – building capacity and delivering easy, flexible, convenient and cost effective access to services – depends on the adoption of cloud as a platform to deliver services and innovations.
Both Amazon (with AWS – Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft (Azure) are now offering local cloud access and services through data centres in Africa. The increased utilisation of public cloud services and the additional investments into private and hybrid cloud solutions will enable organisations in South Africa to focus on innovation and building digital businesses at scale.
As a cloud service provider, Orange Business Services is now in an even stronger position, alongside Genesys, to access local and regional markets and support customers adopting internet technologies such as SD-WAN, and migrate services to the cloud. For large players with on-premise infrastructure, we can now deploy and migrate from legacy hardware to the cloud, while upgrading with the latest solutions.
The new ‘Gold’ status enhances the Orange Business Services offering and adds value for its customers in South Africa, especially in the dynamic contact centre space, where cloud is growing rapidly and is opening doors to new relationships beyond pure connectivity services.