The app experience is the way to go for firms targeting mobile-savvy customers

A subscriber browses the internet on a smartphone. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Like the rest of the world, African consumers carrying smartphones and tablets expect an “app experience” — instant, ubiquitous access to services and content through customised apps.
  • As a result, users of the latest smartphone models still have to check and top up their prepaid balances through SMS or cryptic sequences of USSD codes, and even call the contact centre directly to activate basic services.
  • The data generated by customers through these apps is now digitised and centralised, allowing the business to more insightfully cross-sell products and customise offers to each individual’s specific usage habits or preferences.

In Africa, being customer-centric is becoming synonymous with being mobile. Smart device adoption varies across the region: some countries, like Kenya, have high penetration rates, while others are still at the early stages of the adoption process.

However, the growing availability of low-cost, mass-market smartphones will soon make mobile the default digital platform for consumers in all parts of the continent.

Businesses and the public sector will need to drastically redefine how they work and engage with customers. Like the rest of the world, African consumers carrying smartphones and tablets expect an “app experience” — instant, ubiquitous access to services and content through customised apps. Organisations should provide these experiences to their employees. 

Unfortunately, many business enterprises find themselves working from a largely blank slate when it comes to developing their own app-centric channels.

Most customer service channels in the Middle East and Africa remain based on traditional models established decades ago. Even the region’s telcos still tend to rely on 2G models of engagement that were conceived when mobile phones lacked high-speed internet access. As a result, users of the latest smartphone models still have to check and top up their prepaid balances through SMS or cryptic sequences of USSD codes, and even call the contact centre directly to activate basic services.

With over 90 per cent of Africa’s mobile users depending on prepaid services, telcos can benefit from a self-service app that allows customers to check their balance, top up, and even log support tickets.

This approach could not only increase customer satisfaction and decrease customer churn, but also significantly reduce costs and streamline fragmented processes by offloading them to digital channels. 

An app-oriented strategy for customer service also creates opportunities to grow revenue across different sectors and geographies. A telco or bank that offers self-service apps to its customers, for example, now also gains a new platform for mobile.

The data generated by customers through these apps is now digitised and centralised, allowing the business to more insightfully cross-sell products and customise offers to each individual’s specific usage habits or preferences.

This also allows the business to improve the app based on insights into how customers are using it. More popular features can be prioritised, while less-favoured functions can be scrapped or tweaked. Organisations should use mobile feedback to treat the app experience as a process of constant improvement rather than a static end-point.

Africa’s enterprises should also consider app experiences for their employees. As consumers in their own right, employees have the same growing expectations of intuitive, robust mobile app design.

Because of their integral role to any organisation, however, their range of use is significantly wider than that of customers. The benefits also span both the outward service presence and the back-end operations of the business. Employers should continually seek to improve the app experience based on data about employee interactions as well as more conventional face-to-face discussions about what is working and what could be better. 

Investing in app experiences is a must for any business in Africa if it wants to engage with evolving consumer (and increasingly, enterprise) behaviour.

This requires business leaders to redefine customer service as a personalised, data-driven process, where feedback from user data can and should directly inform improvements to app design and development.

Like other online and digital channels, apps leverage an organisation’s central enterprise IT systems, but in a way that provides a simplified yet powerful user experience.

Enterprise leaders will also do well to consider their employees as internal customers for whom access to intuitive and robust mobile apps can dramatically improve productivity at all points of the business.

These changes may take time, but selling the necessity of such a transformation to the rest of the organisation may not be as difficult as business leaders think.

Mr Nesbitt is the IBM general manager, East Africa. [email protected]