Customer experience focus for East Africa

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Genesys, currently experiencing strong growth in the region, says enterprises in key African development hubs are fast catching up with their international counterparts in terms of next-generation omnichannel customer service, sales and marketing.

“Businesses across major verticals including financial services, healthcare, insurance, hospitality and travel are moving to modernise their contact centre infrastructure, customer experience, customer service, sales and marketing channels are key focus areas.

“This is driven by customer demand and growing competition in these sectors,” said Adriaan van Staden, senior sales manager, Southern East Africa at Genesys.

In many cases, businesses in the region are investing in contact centres and customer experience suites for the first time or are moving from very limited capabilities, and are leapfrogging directly to cloud-based all-in-one solutions, he added.

Van Staden notes that there is particularly keen interest in cloud-based and AI-enabled solutions that allow for in-depth analysis of customer sentiment and market trends, and that support proactive customer service.

“Depending on local conditions, companies in the region are looking to either consider private cloud or a cloud solution such as our PureCloud offering. We see particularly strong demand for cloud/hosted solutions into Africa, where there are skills shortages, rapid time to value is a key and a critical priority. Companies in Africa are looking for innovative solutions with a compelling total cost of ownership and a proven ROI model.”

Africa: innovation leaders

Van Staden notes that as they adopt next-generation customer experience solutions, African enterprises are fast becoming innovation leaders in terms of how they deploy and use these solutions.

“Globally, we find many customers setting up channels based on simplistic business rules for routing decisions across different interactions; whereas across Africa, enterprises are harnessing workforce management along with intelligent routing to direct calls to agents based on agents’ skills levels, their ability to resolve the query, sale or service, with context from previous interactions across their channel of choice and even whether the agents are currently available to handle the interactions.”

These moves to innovate and drive growth by harnessing next-generation solutions are encouraging signs of overall economic development across the region, he said.

“This increased investment is evidenced by our own outstanding performance in the region – in the financial year to date, our SEA Region is currently ranked 5th worldwide out of 26 sub regions globally. In fact, our SEA Region’s growth year on year was 74% in Q1, 110% in Q2, 28% in Q3 and is forecasted to top 87% in Q4.”

Demand for world class solutions in this space is so high in the region that Genesys is actively growing its presence across SEA. “Our current partner network consists of nine value added resellers, each strategically focused on unique Genesys offerings and solutions, and we’ve also added an additional three strategic resellers to meet demand from customers into Africa as well as Mauritius,” Van Staden recounted.

“To meet demand from our growing customer base, we are also increasing our South African team by roughly 25%, and we are also developing a brand new building in Broadacres.

“Southern and East Africa are clearly entering a rapid growth phase and we are excited to be helping drive this new phase in enterprise transformation and development on the continent,” Van Staden concluded.