Technology

Safaricom bets on Nokia’s big data solution for better customer care

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A Safaricom customer care centre in Nairobi. Nokia CEM on Demand helps Safaricom to reduce the time it takes to retrieve subscriber records for customer care. PHOTO | FILE

Safaricom has procured a customer experience management solution from Nokia Siemens Networks to ensure a more proactive response to client needs.

The big data solution is expected to help the mobile operator understand and deal with individual needs of customers.

With a 25 million mobile subscriber base and increasing competition in the sector, Safaricom is relying on the Nokia system for customer segmentation to target campaigns to specific groups.

The system has also enabled Safaricom to use big data technology to derive real time insights from network, customer and revenue.

With these insights, the telco can provide proactive customer care, resolve network issues and prioritise capital expenditures.

The insights are actively used by Safaricom’s technology, customer care, finance, marketing, sales, and strategy teams.

The solution was deployed within 12 months, with a pilot up and running in the first six months in western Kenya.

By using Nokia CEM on Demand, Safaricom has reduced the time it takes to retrieve subscriber records for customer care from between two and six hours to 15 minutes.

The mobile operator can now determine root causes of service degradation which used to take up to 24 hours to 10 minutes.

“We differentiate Safaricom with our customer-centric approach, so our investments in CEM are important. We can resolve issues before they impact subscribers. We can give individual customers a personal touch and make our constant quality of service improvements visible,” the company’s chief executive officer Bob Collymore said in a statement.  

The Nokia solution is a single entry point to dashboard views of mobile operators’ key performance indicators (KPIs) and recommends actions they can take to improve their customers’ experience.

The solution makes it easier to access and share this information in the office or on the go via smart devices such as laptops and iPads.

The announcement of the investment comes barely a month after Safaricom unveiled a suite of products, key among them the Safaricom guarantee that commits to refund customers up to one minute talk time if their calls get prematurely disconnected while speaking to other Safaricom subscribers. 

In the event of a call drop, Safaricom subscribers will get a Short Message Service (SMS) notification and thereafter receive a minute’s worth of airtime compensation.

Safaricom also introduced my-subscription service that allows its customers to view their active subscriptions (Data, SMS, Skiza and Premium Rate Services).

Nokia said the solution allows Safaricom to collect every customer’s network experience from network probes and is integrated into other internal systems including financial, customer data warehouse, customer relationship management and M-Pesa.

“By selecting CEM on Demand, Safaricom is demonstrating once more that its main concern is providing its subscribers with the best possible service in East Africa,” said Bhaskar Gorti, president of Applications and Analytics at Nokia.

Safaricom’s move also comes at a time when the regulator, the Communications Authority ( CA) has increased penalties on poor service.

The operators have been paying a flat rate of Sh500, 000 for non-compliance – a sum that has been seen as too lenient.

The three telecoms operators are now required to pay a penalty equivalent to 0.2 per cent of their gross turnover for offering poor quality services to consumers.

The CA’s latest quality of service report shows that none of the three mobile operators met the required quality standards threshold in 2014-2015.

The CA report says Airtel, Safaricom and Telkom Kenya fell short of the 80 per cent quality mark — a target they failed to meet for the third year in a row.

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