Opinion piece: Merchants contributes to Dimension Data growth
DEEP BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION CAPABILITIES PLAY TO NEXT GENERATION GLOBAL BUSINESS MODELS
Merchants, South Africa’s largest business process outsourcing and customer satisfaction specialist, will play a significant role in the achievement of Dimension Data’s objective of doubling revenue in the next five years.
“The world of business is evolving rapidly towards the cloud and IT delivered as a service,” says Dimension Data group executive, Communications, Adam Foster. “Large and global organisations in particular are realising that their competitiveness is best served by outsourcing areas of their business that are either not mission critical or, like security, call for expensive, scarce resources to underpin the business without creating a differentiator.”
“This enables them to remove restrictions to their agility. They can focus on adapting their own specialisation to ongoing market shifts while leaving the management of their networks, data centres, collaboration and communications capabilities, and security to specialists in those areas who are capable of delivering services on demand.”
“Being able to deliver such services calls for a global presence and technologies and processes that are of sufficient scale. Dimension Data is already regarded as a Tier 1 service provider and is now focusing on extending its global presence still further in order to bring itself to scale for the ‘everything as a service’ world we are expecting within a matter of years.”
“In such a scenario, Merchants is a major asset within the Dimension Data portfolio because of its thirty-year pedigree of dynamic business process outsourcing that enables customer organisations to be tightly customer focused and, therefore, ensure that customer satisfaction initiatives always map to market demand. This is what retains customers and confers sustainability.”
The combination of Merchants’ strengths with Dimension Data’s deep technology capabilities, stemming from its systems integration origins and evolving in the past decade through its solutions and services business, gives customers a powerful hand to hold as they focus on using technology to create desired business outcomes.
“By having Merchants in-house, we are one of very few organisations worldwide able to offer clients a single point of contact, not just for their technology needs but for their need to deliver an exceptional customer experience,” says Dimension Data chief executive officer, Middle East and Africa, Derek Wilcocks. “We are able to make all the as-a-service offerings and capabilities an organisation may need directly relevant to the customer experience they wish to deliver.”
“Most other service providers don’t get involved in the design and delivery of their customer’s customer experience. Or the organisation has to use several service providers to achieve what we can offer through a single interface and an integrated offering.”
In order to provide the integrated consulting, technology, and implementation services needed to add value to the as-a-service future, Dimension Data has overlayed its outsourcing business across all its brands, with Merchants partnering closely in that process and in the resulting service offering.
The process includes providing large customers with a single point of contact and management interface across all the Dimension Data companies.
Dimension Data’s IT as a service offering also spans all the company’s brands, creating platforms at the scale needed to provide clients with the efficiencies, rapid time to market, and flexibility that comes with the cloud.
Dimension Data and Merchants will both extend their geographic footprint, partly by working with customers who are themselves expanding geographically and partly by placing specific skills in regions close to where customers require them. A critical component of this expansion will be the provision by Merchants of help desk facilities for the other Dimension Data brands.
“We expect to leverage Merchants’ intellectual property (IP) in many areas of our new structure as a direct accelerator of the Dimension Data group strategy,” Wilcocks says. “Specifically, we expect Merchants’ IP to be a major differentiator for us as the bottom line relevance of customer service increases and forces changes in the way companies use technology to address their markets.”
The combination of Merchants’ strengths with Dimension Data’s deep technology capabilities, stemming from its systems integration origins and evolving in the past decade through its solutions and services business, gives customers a powerful hand to hold as they focus on using technology to create desired business outcomes