In recent years, there has been a notable and fundamental shift in managerial thinking that has promoted industry leaders such as managers to examine and re-evaluate their perception of the growing role of customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. There is a long history of corporate investment especially in the Kenya telco industry, but most of early metrics were based on word of mouth than facts. However, modern practices have since been devised to measure the value of loyalty based on survey-based data and the introduction of a straightforward loyalty metric: the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is the system that firms such as mSurvey use to gauge loyalty across a number of industries in the country, ranging from transport to mobile operators.
mSurvey understands that NPS is the single most reliable indicator of a company’s ability to grow, and is derived from survey responses to a likelihood to recommend a product or service based on a scale.
The firm has now released its State of Customer Experience in the country that covers 10 industries. Generally speaking, mSurvey highlights inconsistent customer experience across all sectors, save for Health and Energy that maintained consistency in 2018.
Of particular interest is Kenya’s third largest carrier Telkom, which emerged as the leader in 2018 with an average NPS of 22.5. According to mSurvey, the impressive numbers were based on the carrier’s activities that have made it the preferred network for demographics that look for value in data plans. One user reported ‘consistent network and data speeds, as well as affordable rates.’ Safaricom came in second with an NPS score of 16.75 and Airtel closed the race thanks to a series of complaints that faults its poor connectivity in some areas.
These numbers reinforce the larger picture of telco trends in the country. Telkom continues to explore several projects to grow its network, including continual expansion of LTE coverage and plans to launch 4G in remote areas using high-flying balloons that should go live by mid-2019.
