The case of the curious Kenyan consumer

We’ve turned one and over the last year we processed over 9,000 reviews for both B2C and B2B companies across a number of sectors. We’ve highlighted insights and our thoughts for 4 sectors — telecomms, retail, insurance and banking. These sectors have large customer bases and we’ve collected data across a number of companies in these sectors too.

We collect consumer experience data in 2 ways:

1. There are companies that actively use our platform to collect customer experience data for key interactions across their customer journeys. These companies also use a number of different channels to reach out to their customers — face to face via tablets, email, SMS, call centre and even WhatsApp for business.
2. Customers proactively visit our platform and leave reviews for companies that they’ve interacted with.

For each sector we’ve indicated the spread of the customer loyalty (Net Promoter Score, NPS: scale of -100 to +100) as well as their short term satisfaction (CSAT: scale of 1 to 5), along with the industry averages. On a related note, here are our thoughts on the different metrics available when it comes to measuring customer experience.

For these sectors, we’ve also pulled together the top 3 areas that customers have consistently identified as falling short in terms of their expectations. It’s interesting (and perhaps not unsurprising) to note that there were two areas that were flagged up across most sectors — and these are applicable for any brand:

1. Speed of service: Time is precious; especially in this market where consumers spend a larger proportion of their times commuting and have less time for themselves. “Serve me quickly” is going to become a more common consumer expectation in this market. With instant access to information and feedback, customers are also expecting businesses to serve them promptly. Businesses need to think about how they can reduce the amount of time for their customers by simplifying processes and procedures.
2. Issue resolution: The Kenyan consumer understands that things can go wrong. When they do however, they expect businesses to respond quickly to queries and sort out their issues promptly (sometimes even on a 247 availability). One of the challenges, especially when using call centres to assist customers, is measuring incorrect metrics that result in employee behaviours that have a negative impact on the customer. For example — many companies measure effectiveness of their call centres using the average duration of the call with the customer. However, a more effective metric to measure and monitor would be the first call resolution rate (i.e. were you able solve the customer’s problem in the first attempt).

Here are some other trends that are changing the expectations of the Kenyan consumer.

Telecommunications: “Serve me quickly and consistently”

Telecomms is an interesting sector due to the dominance of brands like Safaricom and Zuku, as well as the recent re-branding of Orange to Telkom and their initiatives to capture customers and market share.

This sector had some of the poorest customer experience reviews with an average NPS of -31 and average CSAT of 2.75. Despite the low scores, it does not necessarily follow that brands are experiencing high churn rates — just ask the average Kenyan to recommend you a telecomms provider and note the responses. If the competition is unable to deliver a better/different experience, customers are forced to become loyal instead of them choosing to become loyal.

In addition to speed of service and issue resolution, customers also identified consistency of the service as a major pain point. Businesses in this sector need to think about ensuring customers have consistent coverage of voice and data services; and this is reliant on a solid underlying infrastructure.

Consumer good and supermarkets: “Offer me more offers and discounts”

Despite quite a wide spread, this sector is generally doing well with an average NPS of 60 and average CSAT of 4.33. Generally the loyalty and satisfaction of customers at specialised retail stores was seen to be much higher than those of mass retailers like supermarkets and online marketplaces. The reasons for these are likely to be better product knowledge and really providing a tailored experience to their niche customer segments.

For supermarkets; poor quality of the facilities (ambience, cleanliness, ease of navigation), unavailability of products and slow speeds of checkout were cited as factors inhibiting customer experience. For online marketplaces; logistical issues such as slow delivery times and incorrect orders, as well as the length of time taken to sort out problematic orders were cited as factors inhibiting customer experience.

In addition to speed of service and issue resolution, customers also identified pricing, offers, discounts and loyalty programmes as improvement areas. This implies that the Kenyan consumer is quite price sensitive. Given the macro economic conditions, it’s no surprise that everyone is after more bang for their buck.

Insurance: “Help me understand and pay my claims quickly”

The insurance sector had the widest spread but is also generally doing well with an average NPS of 40 and average CSAT of 3.96. The reason for this is due to significantly better customer experiences provided by insurance brokers that have offset poorer experiences from the insurers themselves. Removing the broker data causes a significant drop in the average NPS to 26 and average CSAT to 3.25 for the sector.

This is a sector that is plagued with mistrust and mis-selling and therefore no surprises that customers want better clarity and understanding of their policies, especially what benefits they are entitled to. One of the challenges in this sector has been around the complexity, jargon and legalese in insurance contracts. Insurers need to figure out how they can communicate these more simply to their customers.

Speed and payment of claims were identified as the third major improvement area. The customer journey map for claims is full of obstacles such as lengthy settlement times (despite guidelines from the IRA), lack of transparency in the claims process, a heavily manual and paper based process, and limited help from the insurers. Insurers need to be thinking about how they can make it easier and more convenient for customers to 1) report claims online and track their status, 2) assess damages and find authorised partners and suppliers and 3) leverage technology to settle simple claims in a matter of hours.

Banking: “Put yourself in my shoes”

Similar to the insurance sector, the banking sector seems to be doing generally well with an average NPS of 39 and average CSAT of 4.01.

A lot of the banks have invested heavily in mobile and digital propositions in an effort to make things simpler for customers. There’s still more to be done to fully digitise the entire customer journey. We’re already seeing how much of an impact FinTech is having on the banking sector and we are going to see even more players emerge, who are able to really design and implement customer-centric business models.

Empathy comes in as a big focus area and a lot of commentary from the customers has been around simplifying the way in which customers have to deal with the banks. As an example, some banks still have complicated and paper-heavy processes when they should be leveraging on mobile and digital to make things easier for their customers. It doesn’t make sense for banks to ask their customers to go into branches to fill out paperwork.

Curious and want to know more? Drop us a message, we’d love to have a chat about how we can help you deliver great experiences to your customers.