As a developing market, Africa is currently gaining much international interest and investment. This is resulting in large multi-national organisations, including retailers, banks and other enterprises, opening up branches on the continent.
However, customer support remains a challenge as traditional telecommunications infrastructure is lacking in much of Africa, as are the IT skills necessary to implement and support the contact centres.
So says Pippa Wilson, portfolio manager for cloud solutions at Jasco Enterprise, who notes while fixed-line infrastructure may be minimal, mobile, including mobile broadband, is burgeoning. This opens up the cloud as a potential technology solution, and cloud contact centres are seeing impressive growth as a result.
Wilson points out organisations looking to move into Africa need to embrace mobility - while fixed infrastructure is often lacking, mobile penetration is vast and still growing. In addition, video is set to play a key role in the African market, she adds.
"Mobile devices, such as smartphones, change customer interactions, and traditional approaches will need to evolve to cater for customers using mobile technology. Video is another key interaction, and will begin to play a more prominent role in customer care and support."
Cloud contact centres are flexible enough to treat mobile interactions the same as traditional fixed voice, while enabling video to become an important interaction channel, supporting interactions from other areas such as social media, says Wilson.
These contact centres can be used to attract international businesses to Africa and increase local opportunities, rather than companies routing their customer interactions to offshore providers, she adds.
A cloud environment offers benefits such as the ability to incorporate multiple channels of interaction with flexibility and agility, as well as remote support, ease of rollout, infrastructure that does not have to be maintained by the business, and little capital expenditure investment, says Wilson.
According to a DGM Consulting research report, in the next few years there is going to be rapid growth in the cloud-based contact centres infrastructure market. The research discovered the number of worldwide contact centre infrastructure seats was1 501 723 in 2013, grew by 11.4% in 2014 to 1 907 188, and is expected to increase by 13.4% in 2015.
It also revealed, as time passes and the cloud-based contact centre infrastructure solutions develop and the vendors improve their ability to execute, fewer organisations will see a clear reason not to adopt the cloud.
"Due to the African market being more innovative and forced to think out of the box - because of skills shortages, infrastructure and cost restraints - technological challenges are normally achieved through cloud or hosting, concludes Wilson.
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