In May 2015, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore held a live Twitter chat with Mail & Guardian Africa under the hashtag #AfricaTechFutures. The session tackled different aspects of the Tech industry ranging from the current trends to Safaricom and factors likely to affect the general direction of technology in Africa. One of the key highlights of the sessions was the CEO saying his biggest tech wishlist was a solution that maps customer queries. “Something that’d let me track customer sentiment in real time a heat map of issues at call centers”, he said.
During the announcement of HY 2016 financials, Safaricom said implementation of big data capabilities to improve customer experience as part of its priorities going forward. Such a solution will allow the telco derive value from customer sentiment from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and even calls. Safaricom further plans to reduce the number of calls to the call center by continually offering customers guided steps towards resolving most of their queries by customers.
Safaricom announced that it has hired the service of Flytxt, a Netherlands based provider of mobile consumer analytics to undertake the task. Flytxt will deploy solutions to allow the telco improve customer experience through personalized and contextually relevant engagement with customers based of the immense amount of data the company receives. Flytxt has been offering similar solutions to MTN Group across Africa. Safaricom struggles to satisfy the demand for customer care services even with a dedicated call center and social media channels. The ability to harness and convert this data is into meaningful information capable of informing decision making is a technology any organization would desire to own with the CEO previously referring to big data as the most underplayed tech trend in Africa.
