Fuelling the digital transformation of South African businesses: the BCX success story, powered by Enreach UP

BCX, one of South Africa’s most innovative and successful ICT service providers, is on a mission to support every aspect of its customers’ comms and IT needs, and enable them to reap the benefits of digital transformation. An integral part of BCX’s approach is its partnership with Enreach, including Enreach Unified Platform (Enreach UP: an advanced, but flexible and easy-to-manage platform for communications, collaboration and productivity).

BCX has supported enterprises in South Africa since 1996, providing a complete information and communication technology (ICT) suite of services. The organisation has been a success story from the start, previously listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and acquired by Telkom, the largest incumbent carrier in South Africa, in 2015. Today, BCX aims to take care of all its customers’ technology needs so that, in turn, they can focus more on their own customers’ business requirements.

A significant part of BCX’s strategy is supporting those customers' digital transformations. Sharon Maasdorp, Managing Executive, Unified Collaboration at BCX South Africa: “The more digital they are, the more they can achieve. Unified communications is where you start, but on top of that, we can add digital applications, such as better customer experience, contact centre features, intelligent bots, self-service, and more.”

An essential part of BCX's digital transformation strategy is moving from its legacy environment into a next-generation one. Domingos Da Mata, Portfolio Executive Unified Collaboration, adds: “Migrating to a more modern platform enables both BCX and our customers to be more agile. It also means we can start decommissioning and reducing the costs of our legacy infrastructure and create a roadmap of new services for our customers.”

BCX turned to Enreach and its flexible and advanced unified communications and converged contact platform. Explains Sharon, “What stood out for us is Enreach’s entrepreneurial and innovative culture, which aligns with our DNA and ethos. We know that we can leverage that entrepreneurial and innovative spirit as we grow, with Enreach bringing us greater agility. With Enreach, we can collaborate on a more open level, working together to find solutions to address the market, including dealing with some very niche needs.”

“Also, Enreach was very accommodating in migrating our customers quickly. We’ve deployed the Enreach platform across multiple data centres, and since many of our customers require data sovereignty, deployment in our own hosted cloud has been important. We now have a resilient and robust platform that gives our customers the uptime they expect, with a fully managed service from BCX.”

The launch of the new platform coincided with the first lockdown in South Africa. So, as businesses had to shut down their offices, BCX was able to help them move into work-from-home modes rapidly, with help from the Enreach platform. “Many customers were happy with what they had, but Covid certainly accelerated their digital transformation. Now, as hybrid working models emerge, we can support our customers whether they are using mobile or our fibre network,” says Domingos.

“Enreach’s experience in fixed-mobile also helps us give customers a ubiquitous experience, empowering them to connect from any device, any time, from anywhere on any network. Our philosophy is to give customers that liberation with our end-to-end solution.” BCX supports both Apple and Android and has made a significant investment in ensuring handset supply for its customers.

Both Domingos and Sharon also feel that Enreach’s vision to converge its contact solutions fits BCX’s approach. “We are as much about IT as comms, and one of our key strengths is our data network, which we have evolved into a converged architecture, which integrates the mobility with the Enreach platform,” says Domingos.

Sharon: “For us, converging different forms of contact is all about removing the complexity for customers, giving them one integrated solution across different apps, networks and devices, and a single SLA. As a result, customers can focus more time on their business without worrying about managing multiple networks and applications.”

BCX also cites the customisation and integration capabilities of the Enreach platform. “We are currently looking at Enreach’s Microsoft Teams integration, and we cannot wait to take Enreach’s bot and contact centre services to market,” says Domingos. “There are many businesses out there that do not require a dedicated contact centre solution, but they still have customer service needs, including via newer channels such as WhatsApp and Telegram. So we expect this to be a growing sector of the next few years.”

Bertrand Pourcelot, Managing Director of Enreach for Service Providers, adds “BCX is exactly the kind of operator we want to work with: customer-focused, future-facing, and embracing the opportunities — particularly around converged contact and mobility — that this fast-evolving marketplace presents. We look forward to supporting BCX’s continued success.”

Migration is ongoing, and as customer contracts reach renewal, BCX presents them with options. Sharon explains, “Customers are at different points in their evolution to digital transformation, and we do not force them to make decisions: this has to be about their preferences. Instead, we take a partnership approach and work with customers so that when they are ready to migrate, the process is smooth.”

BCX is undoubtedly making waves in the South African market, leading the charge in digital transformation that works for businesses and users in a flexible, agile and innovative way. Concludes Sharon, “Enreach aims to be a market leader, and our ambition is to be the leading unified collaboration operator in South Africa. We are partners who are very much in alignment on our journeys, and how we jointly support business users.”

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