Top African companies are in tune with global trends when it comes to delivering future-proof customer experiences by harnessing the power of digital technology. But the journey starts by reimagining organisational structures WordS: CArA BouWer Report While enhancing the customer experience is increasingly a focus of leading African companies, this has not always been the case. “Even just three years ago, I would have said many marketers were oblivious to customer experience,” says Paula Sartini, chief exeutive officer of BrandQuantum, a South Africa-based software company that addresses corporate branding challenges in the digital age. “But there has definitely been a shift. Marketers are now a lot more aware of it.” Sartini notes that new customer experience roles are being created across the industry, and the focus is changing in some organisations. This is stretching African marketers to become more strategic in how they harness the power of digital technology to optimise the consumer experiences of the future. “To get the customer experience right, you have to understand the whole business value chain,” says Sartini. “If you don’t understand, fundamentally, how the business works, and get under the bonnet and really dissect it, there is absolutely no way that you can add value.” This can make the new world of consumer engagement challenging for a traditionally trained marketer, she says – but for those who understand how the business works at a wider level, it becomes easier to look for gaps and deploy technologies to streamline the process. This is exactly the approach being deployed by two African giants: MultiChoice and Safaricom. Creating a ‘customer group’ MultiChoice, which has a DStv multichannel, pay-TV brand that operates across 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean islands, is a multinational brand with an impressive African footprint. As such, the group’s chief customer officer, Simon Camerer, is deeply conscious that the brand promise must be consistent. MultiChoice delivers on this with an internal structure called ‘the customer group’, which Camerer leads. One group exists for South Africa and another, duplicate group looks after the rest of Africa. “The two groups mirror one another, to make sure those efficiencies are top of mind, and this reinforces the overall brand,” explains Camerer. “Fundamentally, it’s the same experience that we give customers. We try to transcend borders in that way.” The customer group spans the MultiChoice value chain and the multiple platforms through which customers can interact with the company, from the contact centre, installers, service centres and agencies, to sales and billing, customer care and retentions. Camerer works with executives across all these divisions, meeting with the full team each Wednesday morning. “While we put the customer at the centre of all we do, we are still a commercial organisation. So the customer group becomes the sort of commercial engine of the business,” says Camerer, who is two years into this role and was previously the group’s chief marketing and sales officer. He believes this customer focus is not just a MultiChoice shift, but a growing trend in Africa that stems from a “key realisation that the business is completely built on the back of your customer – and, if you don’t look after your customer, you don’t have a business”. Technology has an important role to play, of course, and Camerer cites the DStv Now App, which has both an account function and enables customers to stream more than 60 live TV channels via their smartphones. “We have also partnered with IBM and IBM Watson and created an artificial technology (AI) bot called TUMI, which is on every customer care agent’s desktop,” says Camerer. “It makes it easy for our agents to ask a question and for TUMI to come up with the answers. It is immediate and it is accurate. We are teaching it all the time, and the next step is to expose TUMI to customers. “Through such innovations, we’re seeing people moving away from wanting to call us. Instead, they’re increasingly wanting to interact with us through social and digital means. So we’re moving a lot of our resources to those areas. “We now need to focus on how we conduct ourselves in those relationships – what we write, what the empathy is, what the tonality is – and we need to be constantly vigilant.” Monitoring this juggernaut is vital, so MultiChoice has come up with a ‘nerve centre’ to help oversee all platforms. “We’ve created OMNIA, which gives us a bird’s eye view,” says Camerer. “OMNIA is a physical place where, at 8am every day – even on public holidays – we do a call-in, with all customer group divisions represented. We go through all the numbers, look at any issues and whether they’ve been resolved, and how fast that happened, and how many customers were affected.” A digital dashboard system such as OMNIA requires the development of some complex algorithms, but – in addition to such extensive data mining – MultiChoice also makes use of very basic WhatsApp groups, says Camerer, pulling out his phone to show the ‘SL’ (service level) WhatsApp group, which ticks over with continuous system monitoring stats. “We are all joined at the hip,” says Camerer, of the new system. “We’ve been on this journey for about two years, when we’ve had this #CustomerFirst philosophy, which is about changing the culture to be customer first. We’ve put structural changes, measures and bonus objectives in place, and I think we’re getting to a point where people [across the group] are beginning to consider the impact on the customer.” A simple measuring tool is to look at the number of escalations to CEO level, which take place when customers are highly irate. “I was here about five or six years ago when a customer brought in a decoder and a hammer and smashed the decoder. We don’t get that any more,” Camerer says. “We’ve seen a decrease in calls to the call centre over the past two years... and we have managed a 10 per cent improvement in reducing calls over the previous year. Calls are coming down because we are improving the experience.” #CustomerFirst for business growth Jannet Atika, director of customer operations at Safaricom, believes the customer experience is the new business case for growth. She puts her money where her mouth is by advocating for Safaricom’s 30 million customers, even when the resultant decisions require the business to take a step back. A perfect example of a hard business call, The speed read African marketers are confronting the same customer experience challenges facing the rest of the world Leading African companies are increasingly putting the consumer back at the centre of business strategy Some brands are taking up the challenge by creating customer care leadership roles Digital technology is a vital component in the drive to understand and service the customer as efficiently and effectively as possible Rather than alienating companies from their consumers, digital can be used to automate processes, thereby freeing up marketers to play a more strategic role “For the business to pull [The BIG Box] off the market because the customer care team said so was unprece- dented, but it was done” jannEt atika, dirEctor of customEr opErations, safaricom E-commErcE is alrEady dEfining consumEr ExpEctations spurred on by her team’s intervention, is highlighted by The BIG Box rollout in 2015 – the first decoder in Kenya to offer free-to-air television channels and Wi-Fi. “When we launched, we made the product functionally good, but we never made it exponentially good,” reflects Atika. “At that time, we weren’t really as customer-centric, and it was a big fail. Three years ago, we queried the product and asked the business to withdraw it, put it back on the bench and rebuild it. For the business to pull it off the market because the customer care team said so was unprecedented, but it was done.” Today, with the product in line with the customer journey, the roughly 2,000 queries that used to come in on a daily basis “have dropped to almost zero”. Atika’s views fit comfortably with CEO Bob Collymore’s approach. This top-down support shows the company working hard to service customers in layers, using digital channels, as well as call centres and SMS messages. “About 60,000 of these interactions are served via digital platforms... with about 6,000 through social media, Twitter and Facebook, [plus] SMSes to the tune of about 60,000. Around 120,000-130,000 will be voice calls that go direct to an active agent to handle. Our customers can make very conscious decisions about how they want to be served,” says Atika, who cautions against forcing clients to use digital technologies. “Instead, we are saying that this is available to you to use; it is easy, it is accurate, fast, prompt, and it is personal to you.” The Safaricom journey is integral to the story of M-Pesa, the mobile phone-based money-transfer technology – which means digital is part of the company’s legacy. In 2016, Safaricom announced the use of Nokia’s Customer Experience Management on Demand service to improve the experience and help the company learn more about its clients. In the future, it will look to robotics to “seamlessly interface the self-service platform and help our customers”, says Atika. “With technology, you can enhance the experience of the customer, especially when you are talking about proactivity and understanding exactly what the customer is doing. This means not reacting to problems, but being proactive in solving the problems.” Atika’s team works closely with marketing to help create budgetary savings and to ensure campaigns meet customers’ needs. “We’re using technology to get all the right information to share with our internal marketing team. We’re really joined at the hip. I think that is where companies should focus.” If African marketers don’t make use of these insights to structure their communication with customers, they are wasting their marketing budget, says Atika. “For our team, and for Africa, I believe you need to work very closely with marketing to ensure they are making customer-centric decisions and that they are reaping a higher return on investment for their marketing efforts. Marketing must be relevant, so marketers have to operate differently.” Shaking up African marketing While MultiChoice and Safaricom hold great lessons for African businesses working across cultures and geographies, they are by no means the only consumer-driven firms on the continent. By highlighting companies that are pushing the boundaries, Sartini believes other African industries will be inspired to apply similar thinking. She thinks financial services holds many examples, and highlights the move into the South African banking space by well-known health and insurance group Discovery. This move, believes Sartini, will disrupt the sector because Discovery’s business model is highly digital, so rivals will have to “radically shift to compete”. This shift is far more encompassing than simply broadening the role of the marketing team into a vertical function that touches the entire value chain. It will also require established companies to align the work of marketing and IT, as well as human resources, to position the business from the philosophic perspective. “The ability to influence the customer journey comes down to the internal vision,” adds Sartini. It is for this reason that companies headed by marketing-focused CEOs have the edge. “The customer journey is not just about marketing – it’s not something to be delegated out. It’s a top-down function. So when you have CEOs who are the marketing lead... they are generally miles ahead.” How the company is structured also plays a vital role, claims Atika. “Most companies that don’t perform very well confuse customer care and marketing. They sometimes have it embedded as a small unit within marketing and they don’t have it standing alone. At Safaricom, we have one customer-centric pillar, and the whole organisation measures itself against that pillar. Customer operations stands on its own and reports directly into the CEO – otherwise, you’ll have business today and no business tomorrow if you are not listening to your customers.” The digital conundrum The concern raised by some is about whether the very digital tools that enable companies to glean information about their customers, also have the potential to create distance. “You want to automate the repetitive tasks that can be automated,” says Sartini. “That’s where machine learning comes in – but those don’t impact on the human touch.” Camerer responds by querying whether consumers even want a ‘personal relationship’ with a company. “If they can avoid calling us and having a relationship with us, outside of switching on the TV and enjoying the content, that’s the kind of relationship I want to have. The next level of relationship is where we can offer more value – and that’s in the retention space.” He adds: “If I can understand which customer I’m speaking to, with which message on which digital platform, I’m able to tailor and target far more effectively – so my media wastage comes down and the satisfaction levels for my customer rise, because I’m suddenly relevant and on point. The level of customer expectation will grow more and more as these things happen. You can’t do that in the old marketing model.” Atika believes this speaks directly to the future role of African marketers. “It’s no longer about how fantastic the advert is going to be – it’s about speaking the language of the customer and addressing the things that the customers are talking about. You can only know that if you are speaking continuously to the front-line team that is engaging with them on a daily basis.” This, in turn, will enable marketers to spend time being strategic and analysing the market. “Most of the time, marketers are bogged down with operational stuff and they are just treading water. They have little time to sit in the C suite and give input in terms of the business model. So automation can free them up to be more strategic,” says Sartini. Camerer is adamant that any marketer who doesn’t embrace the advantage of digital is doing the profession a disservice. “Marketing, nowadays, should be about bits and bites in terms of the platforms we use, the way we engage digitally and the data we collect, because every single click – and every single swipe and dwell time on a website – represents information that I should be gathering, harvesting and interpreting into a better offer for our customer. If a marketer hasn’t got that, then they aren’t marketers any more.” Sartini agrees that digital enables a seamless and customer-focused experience, but she believes more African companies should focus on aligning the entire organisation around the customer journey. This, notes Atika, requires an appreciation of the fact that “you will never see money being reported to come from customer care efforts, but you can see the implications, the impact, on the revenue”. Ultimately, the customer experience is a holistic challenge and organisations have to use their resources in such a way that the entire company tries to deal with it collectively, agrees Camerer. This means breaking down siloes, moving away from competing internally and putting the customer back in the driving seat. Yes, digital is a vital tool – but it can only be wielded effectively by an organisation that is tactically set up to support the very best experience for the African consumer. “If I can understand which customer I’m speaking to, with which message on which platform, I’m able to target more effectively” simon camErEr, chiEf customEr officEr, multichoicE cim.co.uk/exchange E-commErcE is alrEady dEfining consumEr ExpEctations l In South Africa, e-commerce has been growing at a rate of 26 per cent since 2015 l There are currently more than 18 million e-commerce users in South Africa l An additional six million users are expected to be shopping online by 2021 l It is predicted that, by 2021, e-commerce users will spend an average of US$189.47 online l Currently, the total South African e-commerce revenue across all product categories is US$2.69bn l Electronics and media account for 35.9 per cent of the e-commerce market share, followed by furniture and appliances (20 per cent) l In South Africa, 60 per cent of online shoppers buy via desktop, 55 per cent by mobile and 38 per cent by tablet Source: Export Entreprises SA / Santander