Case Study: M-KOPA

Amidst rapid growth, M-KOPA wanted to be even more connected to customers. With the Echo platform, thousands of customers have engaged M-KOPA in intelligent, automated, yet personal SMS interactions. These generate actionable insights and enable M-KOPA to grow smarter; remaining user-centered and responsive while focusing technical resources on core product innovation efforts.

The Business Problem

Since 2011, M-KOPA has connected over 750,000 households in East Africa with pay-as-you-go (PAYG) renewable energy solutions. As the business grows, so does the task of directly and efficiently connecting with customers in real time.

Early on, M-KOPA built a call centre to manually field customer issues and a custom customer relationship management (CRM) system to track them and send one-way SMS alerts. However, the team also wanted to engage customers in an automated, intelligent way that generated actionable data, whether on demand or via continuous monitoring.

The Echo Platform Solution

Rather than divert more technical resources to develop a new system, M-KOPA found an off-the-shelf solution in the Echo platform.

M-KOPA first used the platform to send simple multiple-choice SMS surveys to customers. Unlike the unstructured call centre feedback, this produced segmented, on-demand data for comparison over time. Automated SMS surveys were also less costly for M-KOPA and free for customers to complete.

M-KOPA has since expanded the platform across teams — from customer service to sales, marketing, and human resources. Each team experiments with different features like surveys, alerts, referrals, campaigns, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Since inception, M-KOPA has sent over 5 million text messages, conducted over 4000 surveys and reached over 750,000 unique customers.

Beyond the technology, users regularly engage Echo Support Specialists to experiment with new approaches, optimizing their content and strategy to ensure better customer engagement and experiences.

What’s Next?

As M-KOPA continues to grow across Africa, even greater efficiency and automation will be required for the company to stay in touch with its customers, and the Echo platform is ready.

M-KOPA first plans to use Echo APIs to integrate with its CRM and business intelligence tools. This will automate the flow of customer data between systems, keeping profiles up-to-date with less manual data entry and analysis.

M-KOPA is also exploring new markets and channels, using the Echo platform to trial interactive voice calls (IVR) in Uganda where literacy is lower and multiple languages spoken.

Like many social enterprises, continued growth will bring new challenges, opportunities and decisions for M-KOPA. The Echo platform provides the scalability necessary to enable this growth with actionable insights, as well as the flexibility to design new customer experiences for new products and services as M-KOPA evolves.

Both companies expect their productive partnership to grow and endure, changing lives across Africa by bringing affordable renewable energy, appliances and finance — backed up by world-class customer service — to those who need and deserve it most.

Ready to catch up with the world’s most successful companies to ensure the future health and growth of yours? Echo Mobile is here for you. Contact us on info@echomobile.io