How East African Businesses can Thrive by Upping the Ante in Customer Experience

Happy-and-loyal-customers

Back in 2014, one of EY’s report stated that more than 50% of the customers in Kenya reported a bad experience when transacting, compared to a third of bank customers globally.

The reason for this rather alarming number in bad customer experience was largely blamed on aggressive uptake of technology innovations by brands, thereby – creating technical hitches that trickled down to customers.

This premise made sense, considering that Africa started to adopt digitalization quite late compared to developed economies around the world. Moreover, Africa had to skip the use of desktop online technology, due to rampant use in mobile devices, in the past 3-4 years.

Fast-forward to 2017 – and the continent is still wrestling with poor customer experience, and East Africa seems to be taking a substantial amount of the hit.  

It was predicated in 2015 that by 2020 – around 5,000 new customer service centers are expected to open and these job positions include customer experience mangers and contact center managers.

While this figure might be a silver lining for the region – a great deal needs to be done to up the ante in customer experience for East African businesses.

Now, consider the following hard hitting figures:-

  • 73% of companies in the world with the most positive CX impact understand the link between customer experience and business results
  • Companies with the strongest Omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak Omnichannel strategies
  • More than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments towards customer experience innovations by 2018

So, what exactly does East Africa needs to understand to lead a transformation in customer experience?

  1. Know Thy Customer: Knowing customers has become the single most important job for customer experience leaders, especially with the extensive use of multiple mediums of interactions by consumers, such as chat, messaging, social media, forums, etc. A 360 Degree View of customer across all channels of interactions, along with customer intelligence & machine learning, and Voice of Customer can help brands attain the goal of completely knowing the customer.
  1. Total Accountability: Most of problems with customer induced escalations happen because the back office attributes priority to customers autonomously. In other words, there is a lack of accountability between the front office or contact center agents and the back office employees. A fused structure with the help of Case Management, Real Time Monitoring, and Business Rules will help organizations establish clear and total accountability. Thereby, front Office has access to case history, while back Office has access to all interaction channels.
  2. Agent Empowerment: Contact center employees are businesses’ best way to reach out to customers and achieve premier customer experience. For that reason, arming your employees with customer insights, updated training and knowledge management is of utmost importance in present times. This can be done with the help of Unified Desktop, Training Needs Identification, and an Integrated Knowledge Base. All this will ensure that employees have up-to date information to answer customer queries with unparalleled precision.

On 21st-23rd June 2017, Villa Rosa Kempinski in Nairobi, Kenya will be hosting Customer Experience Management East Africa. Ameyo will be present in the speaker panel of an elaborate discussion around East African consumer behaviour, Voice of Customers, Big Data in CX, etc. 

Mr. Sachin Bhatia, Founder – Ameyo will also be speaking in great detail about Know Thy Customer, Total Accountability, and Agent Empowerment, and about Ameyo next path breaking offering in the realm of customer experience – Ameyo Fusion CX.

Hope to catch up with one and all of you at Customer Experience Management East Africa!