Safaricom in Sh1bn customer care plan

Safaricom will invest about Sh1bn and hire 300 new customer service employees in the next two months as it seeks to boost its services and retain subscriber numbers.

A location has already been earmarked to host a new customer care centre.

The move, seen a precautionary measure in the face of growing competition, marks a complete turnaround by the mobile provider which in July last year had sought quotations from local Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms.

“Outsourcing the customer care function proved to be too expensive for the kind of quality that we required. We will just have to run the service in-house,” said Safaricom chief executive Michael Joseph.

He said the high cost of bandwidth that made it practically impossible for Safaricom to outsource what it viewed as a non-core business.

The new Sh800 million facility is located along Mombasa road and is slated to be in operation by the end of October.

Many companies have been turning to BPOs as the financial benefits of outsourcing continue to make it compelling, with cost savings and efficiency improvements being the dominant reasons companies use such services. However, companies biggest concerns on outsourcing relate to data security.

Lately, congestion in Safaricom care centres and on its toll-free numbers 100 and 234 (for M-Pesa) has made it a subject of debate among its clients.

The company also promised to increase the number of customer booths especially in urban centres as its subscriber base hit 11.1 million users by the end of June 2008, representing a 7 per cent increase in its market share from 77 per cent last year to 84 per cent this year.

“We admit that we are having a challenge with customer service and it is the reason we are adding the number of booths,” said the firm’s head of new products division, Betty Mwangi-Thuo.

On its money transfer service, M-Pesa, the firm reported that it had registered a 50 per cent growth in the first quarter of the year from 2 million subscribers in March this year to 3 million by June.

“New registrations continue to exceed an average of 10,000 per day and by the end of July, the total registered users exceeded 3.3 million,” she said.

Total person to person transfers reached Sh6.88 billion in July, a growth rate of 220% over the March figure while the total value of all transactions during July exceeded Sh21 billion.