Podcast: Orange Business Services talks COVID-19 and keeping customers connected

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Welcome to the Light Reading podcast. This is Phil Harvey. I'm an editor here at Light Reading, and I am joined on this podcast by my colleague and fellow editor Kelsey's? Iser? Helmut Reisinger is joining us. He is the CEO of Orange Business Services. He's been a podcast guest before. And by the way, OBS is the IT and integration side of Orange. The massive carrier. Elliott lamprey is his colleague and she will also be joining us. She is a senior vice president of customer services and operations, and she also worked in the network side of Orange Business Services before that. So on this show, all of us are going to be talking about how Orange Business Services and their customers have adapted to things changing and being upended by COVID-19. What is business continuity look like? What lessons did they bring back from the Asia-Pacific region, one scope of COVID-19 sort of took hold there? And we'll also talk about what executives are expecting to see once things go back to normal. Will there ever be a normal after this? To find out, keep listening. We'll be right back after this break. The first question I have is for Helmut Reisinger and Elliott lamprey. What steps have you taken to make sure that Orange Business Services can continue to provide service during this pandemic?

This is Helmut speaking. So on the Orange Business Services side, and you know, we are a network-native digital services company operating in more than 100 countries. The first care that we need to make sure we take care of is, of course, for our staff. We have 27,000 teams across the world, and we could get well prepared because we had seen already mid-January where our teams in China have gone into home and teleworking that this could be spreading more quickly than we thought. And this is why we had to adapt already. And nowadays, within a short period of time, we had more than 95% of our staff across the world working today from home. We have people who are in our so-called secure service cockpits that are on site, or people that are for good contractual reason, for very specific solution sets, for critical infrastructure companies, for example, who are still on site. But this is a small minority, and this can be in India, it can be in France, it could be even in other countries of the world. So the first thing was, of course, health and safety of our staff, and this can only be done with a very transparent and very frequent communication to your teams via the global theaters that we are operating in. Second top is, of course, with our customers, because we saw that depending on the global operation of each customer, they have been different alerted to this situation. And like a lot of companies have also rethought their supply chains, health IT is secure and prepare themselves in their supply chain. People are already preparing and anticipating as well for their own stuff and your own needs. So we saw, for example, a seven times multiplication of the teleworking capabilities that we are providing today for our global class, and that's the same by the way whether we talk about Asia-Pacific or whether we talk about Latin America. I think there we see that this digital has become a kind of a global universal approach. That also the capability of working and still sharing the knowledge during such a pandemic situation is very vital for the enterprises. And we had also a custom advisory board that rich digital fashion by the way that have given us the feedback as well. Number one, digital will be more accelerated. Number two, the visibility of the IT and what the CEOs have been driving towards the president has actually been increasing very fast. And third, when we talk later on maybe on the post-COVID situation, this will really change a bit our habits. But I'll let our global director for service and operations with global teams give you a few more insights. Maybe Elliott, if you want to share a few of them.

So you talked about making decisions at the right level of the company. Were there any other lessons you learned from your operations in Asia specific initially at the outset of the pandemic that you could then apply to other regions that you're operating in?

This pandemic has a special connotation, I would say, as a characteristic which is it touches ourselves and everybody can be concerned by this. While, for example, our businesses' historic business continuity plans, and you see this is also dynamic, were more oriented towards what happens if there is a submarine cable cut, one of our major service centers is isolated, what happens if there is a change of government and for whichever reason there's a curfew and our people cannot access a given major service center, for example in Egypt, or what happens if there's a Hurricane Katrina and how do we handle this. Here it was always a more anonymous kind of event, which means the context, it means maybe a technical issue here. There is something invisible that suddenly touches us as human beings. So we needed also there really to make sure that we take care of our employees and make sure that we help them to go through that situation. What did we learn from Asia Pacific? I spoke personally with our head of China and our head of Asia Pacific very early on. One of the key things I believe is frequent and always transparent communications as much as possible. You need to make sure that there is this empathy still alive even though we are in this digital workspace environment nowadays. So this is, I believe, very, very important to make sure that we have this sharing and the feeling of belonging still there while we all discover that we are human beings, which means, oops, we really miss those social contacts in terms of handshakes and so on. But that's an early honor. What we also learned is that there is a fantastic degree of solidarity, I would say. That's a paradox. On the one hand, we are more socially distant, but on the other hand, in terms of solidarity, we are much more close. And our business, of course, is impacted as so many different businesses as well. Now, as you know, we are network native, which means we have a lot of operator part in our business, but one third is more individual services. So our consultants in the digital arena cannot access our customer sites, so that's clearly impacted. So what we said is we create our own platform, an internal marketplace. If people have demand, maybe for certain skills, and we have an internal program called Digital and Data Acceleration to render the digital much faster available internally. We said maybe there are some people now who are free because they cannot access customer sites, and on this marketplace which we call 'Let Me Help', we make this available. And what we learned is there's a tremendous degree of solidarity that is really there across the globe, and this is independent of whichever geography the people belong, and this creates a very good spirit of belonging as well as going through this crisis together. And this is a positive recognition where sometimes given this external shock you can create a new dynamic because the people and the organization focus on the essentials internally and of course as well for our customers.

And maybe if I may add to that because it just came to my mind, I think what is also rather new is that it's a very dynamic situation. Which means historically if we had our business continuity plans, take a hurricane situation, it concerns one geography, it concerned one specific event. Here, yes, it's also one phenomenon, which means this pandemic, but the situations need to be responded to differently from India versus Singapore versus China versus France versus Italy versus United States of America. Take Singapore just announced, I think yesterday, that the lockdown will be extended now until end of June, so our teams need to adapt to that given also the national or the local needs and recommendations that are given by the local authorities. Another aspect is, I believe, and this was a nice discovery that we had, if we take our home market France, what such a pandemic or this crisis allows us is to focus on the essentials. Which means we have in certain parts of the processes found, whoops, we actually could do much faster if we did this in a different fashion than we did it in the traditional routines. So given the fact of this pandemic, we have rethought a certain activation process which now can be done in a very short time, which in previous times would have taken two or three days. And this is a positive recognition where sometimes given this external shock you can create a new dynamic because the people and the organization focus on the essentials internally and of course as well for our customers.

Okay, thanks for that. So to be aware of time, I have a we'll end with a couple of questions. First, I'll ask about how the network is holding up, and then maybe we can get into what the new normal will look like for your customers and for Orange Business Services after we kind of get by the worst of this pandemic. First of all, on the network side, the network of course seems to be holding up well even though so many processes and things have suddenly become digital. You know, business travel, there are now hour-long conference calls or multi-hour long conference calls and video calls and things like that. So it put a different type of pressure on the network. I guess my question is, is Orange Business Services capable of continuing to adjust and maintaining this network capacity going forward? Because I think a lot of these processes are going to stay digital and maybe not go back to the physical world. Do you have thoughts on how the network is going to hold up and evolve?

I let Elliot start on this because she was actually managing before her current job actually the global backbones. Elliot, would you start on that? Yes, sure.

I do believe what we have clearly seen is that the reliability of a global network operator plays out here. But we have received from customers really fine thank you messages from so many customers from across the world, from Australia to the United States. It has helped us as well to help them in customer cases where they wanted to go. If you think about the ministries of foreign affairs, they were very busy with bringing home their citizens, so there was a lot of help lines that needed to be put up and contact centers needed to be put up in a very short period of time. Here again, we have put in place cloud-based contact center solutions for many of the global ministries of foreign affairs that we are serving, or having a chatbot solution that answers quickly questions that are coming in because of this massive increase of questions. So overall, I do believe that the reliability has shown well in this very difficult time. In terms of the post-COVID situation that you were referring to, I believe what we learn out of it is the trend that we have already seen. We are in a hyper-connected world, it will continue. There will be, I do believe, an acceleration towards a new balance between digital and physical. The way of working, and I told one of our customer advisory board members who is a very global consumer goods company, they have about they have a physical production site of course, they have about 2/3 of the people in teleworking. They reckon that the new norm will not be 100% will permanently come back again, but probably it's going to be 50/50 of the people teleworking. So there will be shifts in terms of the new way of balance between digital and between the physical presence. I do as well believe that people realize preparedness for a good IT infrastructure is almost as critical as a good healthcare system. I think this pandemic shows us that the degree of vulnerability may vary quite substantially between the but both for the public sector or for a given country, a good healthcare system is as vital and important as for an enterprise a good IT and digital infrastructure. And what we saw and what we got from our customers well is that those who have already gone with us into the cloud enablement via software-defined networks or via a multi-cloud environment, they had more flexibility and agility at their hands with us to maneuver and to quickly adapt to this new situation. That is, I repeat, very dynamic because the US has a bit of a different situation. It's the main thing, the same phenomenon, but also in the United States it depends very much on the different states what are the rules in place, same in Europe, and same in Asia-Pacific.

Eliot, do you have any additional thoughts on how things will change for your customers moving forward? We talked a little bit about what the new normal might look like and how are their priorities changing?

Yeah, and in terms of lockdown, I believe there is also one effect, if I may add to an earlier point. If we just think about ourselves as individuals, I think that this pandemic has also given rise to one phenomenon which is telemedicine. We note that both in my home country Austria but also we as Europeans, we are extremely aware and sensitive to what data protection, medical data, that's a holy grail if I may call it like that. On the other hand, and if I quote some of our healthcare responsibilities in the countries, they said what is now possible and also accepted by the public would have taken probably years to implement. Now it has been enabled in weeks. Teleconsulting with your doctor because you could not physically go there, but still there was the need, and people of course prioritize. It does not mean that you enable non-secure accesses, of course, but the acceptance and the behavior, I think, and the cause for change has really been accelerated due to this pandemic as well in the telemedicine and in the health arena.

That's a great example. I did have a call with my own doctor recently and I was surprised at how well it went. And you know, I got the results I was looking for and a prescription that helped and it was really quick. So I think that's a really interesting point that people are accepting of that now and it'll be interesting if that sticks around. And I really thank you both for being on the podcast today. Helmut Reisinger and Aliette Mousnier-lompre, thanks so much for joining us. We do appreciate it. I want to thank Avast for sponsoring this week's podcast. Smart Life, a fully converged solution for digital security, is deployed at the device, router, and 5G edge network perimeter, enabling their award-winning security solutions to protect your customers' entire digital lives. Together, Avast and partners can build products and services people can trust and will keep coming back to. Let Avast help you build a safer digital world for your customers. Discover more at Avast.com/partners. That's A-V-A-S-T.com/partners.

That is it. That's our show. Thanks so much to the Orange Business Services team for participating in this podcast. Aliette Mousnier-lompre, who connected from Paris, Helmut Reisinger, who was connecting from Austria. I really appreciate their time and insights. Thanks so much to our producer, Tianfu, because if it weren't for him, you wouldn't hear any of this. Thanks to you, dear listener, for making us feel welcome in your home office, on your recumbent bike, your bunk bed pillow fort, or wherever the hell you happen to be connecting this week. And please do tell a friend to subscribe. And thanks so much for listening to the Light Reading podcast.