Digital sweeps across SA

Digital is sweeping SA, spurred by rapid smartphone adoption and social media usage.

So said Ronen Levkovich, president of Amdocs' EMEA division, when opening the Amdocs Africa Executive Summit yesterday in Johannesburg.

He believes there is no doubt SA is becoming more connected and more digital, and digital adoption is one of the biggest trends that impacts on the lives of customers and organisations.

"Digital is expanding to other verticals like financial services, machine-to-machine, retail, utility, healthcare and education," he said. "It is competently transforming the way we engaging with our customers."

Digital is massive and Gartner predicts that by 2017, 8% of service providers' revenue will come from digital services, Levkovich pointed out.

According to Levkovich, becoming a digital player is a journey and, in order to win the opportunity and be successful, organisations need to be open to innovation, adopt the right business models, build the right operations, and, above all, find the right partner for the journey.

Also speaking during the event, Vincent Rousselet, vice-president for customer insight and strategy at Amdocs, said the digital revolution is under way in SA with 79.1 million mobile connections - equivalent to 146% penetration of the population. Smartphones now account for 33% of mobile subscribers and 73% of data traffic already, he added.

In SA, said Rousselet, smartphones will contribute 80% of total mobile data traffic by 2019, compared to 73% at the end of 2014. Mobile data revenue reached $3.09 billion in 2014 and will reach $3.5 billion in 2015, he noted, adding 43 billion minutes (81 826 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2019 in SA.

"That's 16 365 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second. Really exciting, but also challenging to capture the value from these evolving behaviours and habits."

In emerging markets, he said, just as in advanced markets, the expansion of the digital sector is opening up the telecoms sector to new players, particularly over-the-top (OTT) providers of Internet-based content, commerce, and communications services.

Netflix said it intends to launch operations in SA within the next two years as part of its global expansion strategy, said Rousselet, adding the video-on-demand service told shareholders it believes it can complete its international roll-outs in two years while remaining profitable.

With digital, it is now a world of increasing customer expectations, unprecedented technology advancements and intensified competition. "Just like rugby, it's brutal, but you can win."

He pointed out that "as things move fast in our daily lives, customers around the world tell us they need to and want to become a central part of the digital world".

Rousselet said since the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, service providers have watched new rivals chip away at their assets. To varying degrees, he added, they have lost their hold on devices, communication services and digital content to retailers and OTT players.

"Even their grip on the network, once thought to be untouchable, faces challenges from the likes of Google. The one asset the service provider has managed to hold on to is the customer. And as it is their last untouched asset, it's one they can't afford to lose."

He believes competing on customer experience is tricky for service providers. "In the past, operators viewed one another as their competition as they fought for subscribers. Today, while companies such as Uber or Zappos don't offer similar services to service providers, they do set the customer experience bar at a level that service providers need to reach. They are the modern face of customer experience."

Thus, in order to win in the digital economy, customer experience is becoming the only basis of competitive advantage. "Customer experience is no longer about the why or the how, but the how well."