Officially,Africa is the second largest mobile market in the world andthe growth is unstoppable bearing in mind only 30% of continent population ownsmobile phones.Over the past month,I have met more than six top executivesworking with mobile network operators in sub Saharan Africa who revealed to methat their immediate focus is to improve customer service.In my opinion this isa mantra in the telecommunications industry right now and there is plenty ofroom for improvement in Africa.
Complaints to the Telecommunications regulators in different countrieshave ballooned in recent years as the complexity of telco products has grownand customer expectations have risen. A good case is in Tanzania where roughlya month ago Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority came under heavy publicoutcry because of poor network coverage and congestion.The same has been thecase in Uganda.In Zambia a friend revealed to me that the situation is dire.Inwest Africa,the same applies especially in Cameroon and Nigeria where thegovernment has been forced to intervene.
Africa’s major operators, hands on hearts, have sworn to do better andtwo of the executives swore to me I will see the changes next time we meet.Ofcourse,they are not doing this as an act of charity. They have learned the hardway that bad customer service is expensive to provide. It drives bad volumeswithin the business like complaints that raise cost and promotes expensivecustomer churn. Recently,my boss Heikki Makila told me that what is bad forcustomers is bad for the telcos too.So why haven't Africa mobile network operatorsalready achieved the win-win outcome of better customer service? There are lotsof reasons which have come to my mind.
Many operators' legacy IT systems just weren't designed to cope with therapidly changing multi-product nature of the modern telecommunications businessand this is prominently evident in Uganda,Nigeria,Zimbambwe,Tanzania,Zambia andRwanda. The problems are even worst where stove-piped business units fragmentthe operators' view of the customer and add complexity to the task of customermanagement like has been the case with Kenyan network operators.Many operatorsstill don't fully know what data they have, where it is, or how to get it tofront-line customer service. Even if they did, they often don't have thebusiness processes to use this information to respond to customer needs in realtime.
Solving these problems requires a multi-pronged strategy of ITinvestment and business re-engineering that is, unsurprisingly, hard toexecute. This all has to be done while the business is running at full tilt,without disrupting the services the business provides.By working with SomoconOy,I have gained insights into the challenges facing network operators inAfrica which is one of the fastest growing market globally. Customer servicehas to be one of preoccupations to any CEO in Africa although it may take ayear plus for significant and quantifiable change to flow through.Africa telco'sstrategy should focus on three main components which are processsimplification, customer service improvement, and cost savings because allthree are closely related.
What Africa telco’s should know is that bad volumes in the company aredrivers of cost, and are often caused by poorly-designed process.While talkingseparately to the six executives,it was very clear that there were no silverbullets where attention could be focused and instead most mobile networkoperators have gone through a painstaking process of process re-engineering andIT investment.There is no doubt such improvements are off a base of poorcustomer service, so there is still a lot of work to do.Where there's muckthere's brass and if Africa telco’s are to succeed in cleaning up theircustomer service act,then Africans will be winners as well.
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