customer service centre

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Alibaba Cloud picks Kuala Lumpur as customer service centre for regional services

During the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Alibaba Cloud launched the “Global Delivery and Service Program” to enhance the cloud adoption process for customers. Kuala Lumpur, Porto, and Mexico City were unveiled as three customer service centres that will support customers in their cloud adoption journey, providing timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services.

In addition to the Customer Service Centres, Alibaba Cloud has also set up three Service Delivery Centres in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and Hong Kong, to provide extra technology support to its regional offices and customer project delivery in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

In light of this announcement, Tech Wire Asia reached out to Alibaba Cloud to get more information about this. Here’s what they had to say.

Would the centre in KL be overseeing the cloud services for the entire Asia Pacific region?

For the time being, it is slated that the KL Customer Service Centre and Delivery Service Centre would oversee the cloud services for the SEA region including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Where will the centre be located and how many jobs are expected to be created in the industry from this? Will partners play a role in this?

There will be a venue chosen in KL for the implementation of the services. With the new centre established, there will be more opportunities open to the industry talents.

The Customer Service Centre in Malaysia involves the participation of our collaborative partners. With building a sustainable ecosystem as one of our priorities in the market, Alibaba Cloud strives to collaborate with local partners closely in markets by providing them with the much-needed support in order to further local customers’ digitization journey through the wide range of proven services and solutions offered by Alibaba Cloud.

With tech talent shortage being an issue for most tech companies, how will Alibaba Cloud deal with this in getting talent for their centre in KL?

We understand that the digital future requires talent in order to grow and flourish which is why Alibaba Cloud has introduced several initiatives to furnish Malaysia with a sustainable digital talent pool.

As a leading cloud service provider with two data centres locally, Alibaba Cloud is committed to providing a conducive environment for startups and SMEs to grow in Malaysia and better serve Malaysians by rolling out a series of digital training and workshops in cloud-related technology and business with its first Innovation Centre established in Kuala Lumpur

For instance, Alibaba Cloud launched digital talent strengthening effort -the Digital Heroes Program during Alibaba Cloud Day KL Summit 2022 back in August, in the presence of the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), which is one of the many local digital talent strengthening initiatives that Alibaba Cloud is proud to be undertaking especially for Malaysian students as it is a platform for them to enhance their Cloud Computing industry knowledge.

We have also launched Alibaba Cloud Create@ Global Startup Contest in Malaysia this year which acts as a platform to drive digital transformation and tech innovation and for tech start-ups to unleash their potential via a network of investor ecosystems. Throughout the years, the contest in Malaysia has benefitted an excess of 200 participants in a bid to further their digitalization journey along with the requisite industry exposure.

These initiatives are aimed squarely at developing young, emerging digital talent in higher learning institutions as well as helping Malaysian students to increase their industry sought-after Cloud certifications among themselves, and meet increasingly challenging and ever-changing industrial requirements in the IT industry.

How different is the customer service centre from the service delivery centre in KL?

The customer service centre’s role is primarily aimed at assisting customers in their cloud adoption journey by providing them with timely, regionalized cloud migration and consultancy services. It mainly focuses on support services in the public cloud, customer work orders, and consultations.

On the other hand, the service delivery centre is on hand to provide additional support to customer project deliveries in the market and region, and mainly for hybrid cloud service which is generally delivered on a project basis.

As Alibaba Cloud is the fastest growing in Asia, are there plans to set up more centres in other countries in the future?

Localization has been an always-on strategy for us to roll out the business and serve local customers in the market and region. As with cloud computing’s rapid adoption rate worldwide and technological development on this scale, setting up local service centres in countries and markets that show exponential growth potential has become a much-needed initiative for us to better meet the customers’ need for their digitalization and fulfil the compliance requirements locally.

We will keep you posted on the progress in due course.

Lastly, given the growth of Alibaba Cloud in Indonesia, what other plans does Alibaba have for the country?

Alibaba Cloud has been serving the Indonesian market for over 6 years. Our three data centres in the market are offering a comprehensive suite of products and services that address vertical industry challenges. Alibaba Cloud aims to be a valuable partner for our customers in Indonesia to meet their demand for digital transformation through our cloud and data intelligence technologies. We are committed to serving the Indonesia market with our local competitiveness:

How to serve our customers and help them solve their problems remains a top priority for us. In that regard, we will continue to introduce leading products and services to the market to serve customers’ demands. In addition to IaaS services such as compute, storage, network and security, we are also introducing more advanced AI and digital intelligence products, along with tailored industrial solutions to help customers address their business issues.

We also have new initiatives on digital talent training, to help businesses address the talent shortage issue. We are committed to training 50,000 people with cloud and digital intelligence technology each year for the next two years. We also have ongoing initiatives to support the start-up and developer communities, and together we can develop joint solutions to drive innovation and production.

Last but not the least, we are growing our local ecosystem partnership. We aim to upgrade our partnership program to include 200 local partners in various sectors from retail, finance, and logistics to gaming by end of 2022, providing tailored industrial solutions as well as digital transformation consultancy for businesses to meet their various digital shift demands.