GBS WORLD NEWS | WEEK 3 | OCTOBER 2022

African metaverse content creators are being targeted by Meta, a multinational technology conglomerate, who say African talent is key to unlocking the potential of the emerging technology. The announcement was made during the company’s exclusive extended reality (XR) exhibition, which featured six finalists from the “Future Africa: Telling Stories, Building Worlds” program.

Leading US business process outsourcing (BPO) firm, ibex, will be premiering its newest Beyond the Meter, customer service and customer experience (CX) solutions at the Chartwell EMACS Customer Experience Conference from October 17-20 at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld®. In addition, ibex will also introduce SparkedHome.com, a utility marketplace solution created to offer an array of products and services that have been demonstrated to attract all utility customer segments and drive the repeat traffic essential for long-term success.

Several Canadian financial institutions were recognized for their excellence in CX in the Ipsos 2022 Financial Service Excellence Awards. Simplii and Tangerine tied for the honor of most recommended financial institution. Both Simplii and Tangerine collected three awards each, including a shared win for Value for Money and Mobile Banking Excellence. This years’ edition also featured the release of key data covering customer perceptions of the banking industry in Canada.

Weak consumer demand and underlying concerns of a looming recession are some of the factors slowing retail sales across Europe, according to statistics released by Eurostat. Retail sales in the EU fell 0.2% in August, registering a 1.3% year-on-year decline and a more significant decrease was observed in the eurozone, where the figures stood at 0.4% and 2.0%.

Insights in how to combat downward pressure in the global retail market can now be found in Frost & Sullivan’s newly released Re-imagining the Retail Customer Experience, 2022 report. The report reveals some of the silver linings from the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as industries being forced to reduce inertia in their contact centers. Other salient retail transformations shaped by the global pandemic included adding AI to maturing channels (chat and email) and enhancing proactive outbound contact with additional capabilities (voice and SMS).

A New Zealand-based telecommunications company, Spark New Zealand, has completed a migration to the Genesys Cloud CX platform, a single cloud-based contact center solution. The firm was previously relying on a mix of legacy systems to deliver contact center services. This forms part of their strategy to improve CX and service delivery by streaming operations and enabling its frontline teams to shift to where demand is highest.

Following last week’s coverage of the launch of a contact center in Soweto, South Africa, another South African township suburb on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Nasrec, has been earmarked as the “next immediate” location to set up a contact centre hub by the Gauteng Provincial Government. Proximity to talent and reducing transport costs for agents are among the reasons local operators are making concerted efforts to establish contact centers in South African townships.