Mascom Wireless has issued an apology to its subscribers for roaming challenges they experienced in parts of South Africa a week after the company reaffirmed its commitment to superior customer service during 20th anniversary celebrations.

In a statement this morning, the mobile network operator said technical teams worked overnight to ensure "roaming services to the affected parts of South Africa have been restored."

South Africa is among the first countries where Mascom will be looking to establish a client base for its digitised call centre services business, which will work in tandem with its varied telecommunications services.

This, along with other plans, was announced at the company's 20th anniversary event held recently in Gaborone.

Dzene Makhwade-Seboni, Chief Operations Officer at Mascom also revealed plans to expand and improve the company's offering to include third party call centre services in partnership with Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC).

"In five years' time we want to go to international markets and compete with countries like Egypt, Malaysia and India who have been providing business process outsourcing services for many years. We have already started working with BITC because it is trying to position Botswana as a destination of choice for BPO services. This is not going to be easy but I believe we can do it. We are going to be offering customer service, both inbound and outbound or what some typically refer to as a call centre."

Makhwade-Seboni also indicated that Mascom will also introduce digital customer services.

"The technology that we have procured (for the call centre) allows us to do video contact. I know a lot of companies that are going into video contact especially in countries where contact centres focus on health where video contact is more useful. We will be offering SMS contact, email, webchat, social media and other digital channels. Mascom will train agents to handle these types of interactions for clients. We will also offering back office services like KYC in order to grow the Mascom brand."

Mascom says all interactions in its call centres will be recorded and assessed in order to offer agents more training if required.