How Telkom Kenya is Innovating Around the Customer

Telkom Kenya has been on a transition from that old traditional company to this young, vibrant and future-ready company. This change was meant to make the telco fit well with the changing consumer needs. In line with that, we had a chat with Telkom Kenya’s Managing Director for the Mobile Division, Mr. Amer Atwi. Here we heard about their ambitious plans to focus more on the customer, and innovate around them.

The focus of the meet was to establish the ground covered in terms of customer centricity, its role as one of the telco’s most important aspect and how the rebrand journey has grown so far.

Rebrand Progress

The rebrand journey was launched more than 15 months ago. Over that time, Telkom has grown its subscriber base, launched a series of products and embarked on making data services a flagship product, with a notable appeal to the young people. These developments have not come easy because the telco has invested heavily in people and infrastructure.

“Before the rebrand was announced, Telkom was already in the process of replacing older network system with modern ones. By the time the Telkom name went live, LTE/4G services were ready. The service, thusly, complemented the shift from Orange to Telkom,” notes Mr. Atwi.

In principle, Mr. Atwi says the telco had to scout for the right people and elevate the services of its network because the two investments support each other. Generally speaking, the exercise involved sinking money into the latest technologies and hiring competent people that continue to elevate Telkom’s service offerings in a fierce and harsh telecoms business.

The organization’s overhaul has trickled down to the grassroots as Kenyans can now associate the blue colour with Telkom, which also makes the face of the organization easily recognizable. For the meaning behind the logo and the colours in Telkom, you can refer to this article.

“The visbility of the Telkom as a brand is important to us. We want to be more visible, and while at it, offer the best customer experience,” adds Mr. Atwi.

Customer Care

Speaking of customer experience, Mr. Atwi stated that the corporation is in the process of reaching additional Telkom Kenya subscribers by opening new retail centers. So far, the past two months have seen notable upgrades in the Mombasa and Kisumu shops as we reported here and here. What is more, the shops have been enriched with a vast volume of devices that range from feature phones to LTE-powered smart handhelds. This is a notable addition as previous Orange Shops had a limited number of devices.

It is an ongoing process that targets to serve clients better and to link the entire experience to customer centricity.

“As a business we’re invested in several customer feedback mechanisms that enable the business to gauge customer satisfaction with regards to the services,” says Mr Atwi.

Perhaps the most popular complaint has always been associated with data services. According to the telco, users were not happy that a rival telco had offered a data management tool, but Telkom didn’t. The tool, which stops the consumption of airtime to service data processes once a bundle is depleted, has since been rolled out as we reported here.

Telkom believes that this approach will be a winning formula as far as addressing customer complaints is concerned.

Tutorials and Forums

Lastly, Telkom plans to include do it yourself (DIY) approaches to addressing the most common queries bundle purchase. The essence of this is to make Telkom Kenya subscribers to be empowered with information that they can assist their peers with, on top of the existing customer care channels. This will be in the form of how to videos and presence of support forums.