Orange Group has revealed its plans to support business and individual customers during the global coronavirus outbreak.
Orange, which reported sales of 42 billion euros in 2019, has 147,000 employees worldwide, including 87,000 employees in France. Orange Group, which has presence in 26 countries, has 266 million customers worldwide, including 207 million mobile customers and 21million fixed broadband customers.
Stephane Richard, chairman and CEO of Orange, said he decided to set up and oversee a dedicated crisis unit at the Executive Committee level in order to coordinate the decisions taken by the Group on a daily basis.
“My priority is to safeguard the health and safety of all Orange’s employees. It is essential that we work to ensure the availability, security and integrity of our networks. The Group has taken measures to protect staff during network operations, visits to customers’ premises, and in our supervision centres and data centres,” Stephane Richard said.
Orange said its capacity has remained robust, in particular for the Internet, TV and OTT services despite a significant increase in traffic on fixed and mobile Internet networks. Mobile voice traffic however has significantly increased, doubling in volume. To manage this, Orange has readjusted certain network parameters, most notably regarding inter-operator connection points.
Orange can count on the commitment and mobilisation of its teams, particularly its technical teams, to ensure quality and availability of service during this period. The Group’s networks are already scaled to meet the needs of massively popular events in normal times and benefit from sufficient capacity to handle the current load.
As part of its Business Continuity Plan, Orange has defined a list of priority activities, including network supervision, essential maintenance operations, technical support and commercial assistance.
Orange has closed down all retail stores in France. Customers who need support or who wish to modify their subscription or make a purchase can go to the orange.fr or sosh.fr websites or the “Orange & moi” or “My Sosh” mobile apps.
Digital services, such as chat platforms, also remain available to enable customers to interact with customer support staff.
Orange is offering all of its customers free-to-air broadcasting of the four OCS channels and the five kids channels (Boomerang, Tiji, Boing, Toonami and Canal J) via their set-top box until 31 March 2020 (excluding on-demand services).
Orange Business Services has increased its network capacity and upgraded its service platforms. The number of users connecting to their company’s network remotely has already increased by 700 percent among its customers.
Orange Business Services has doubled the capacity for simultaneous connections on its platforms. The use of remote collaboration solutions such as video conferencing has also risen with usage increasing by between 20 and 100 percent depending on the solution.
Orange France is managing an additional 130 customer operations per day to increase the speed of their Internet connections or at their Data Centres. Nearly 3,500 Orange Business Services employees are mobilised to manage customers’ business critical activities and will continue to do so.
