Nigeria’s MyWorkSet Wants to Make Client Relations Vegetables

For SME’s and corporate firms, managing client relations and day-to-day business communication is cumbersome. Most of this companies have client contacts in excel sheets, as texts, dialed phone numbers, emails, business cards and just about every format and though it sounds good having contacts in all these formats, it makes client relations as hard as a bone.

That’s where MyWorkSet comes in.

Founded last year by Ogugua Belonwu, a graduate of Computer Science from  Nnamdi Azikiwe University, MyWorkSet is a customer relationship manager (CRM) platform enabling  users to pull and categorize their contacts from different sources – text/excel files, email, personalized forms hosted on MyWorkSet and from any other source using its Data API. MyWorkSet also helps users to keep track of  their contacts by following, dropping notes and setting reminders on them.

After organizing one’s contacts, users can then easily target and send SMS and emails to each target category. For instance one can target their contacts in a particular category that reside in Lagos and are Female. MyWorkSet also helps users to set up tasks for self, a certain department say sales, a specific branch or entire company or team and follow up on performance of each task.  In a company, each user has full control of their contacts and they can decide to export them anytime.

Belonwu didnt just Google for ideas to launch MyWorkSet,but was inspired after a tough battle with the same problem at his company Best Value Providers. They had challenges with contact management and on how to reach out to their clients.

“We had a need for a platform that will enable us pull our ‘scattered contacts’ together from our websites, mobile phones, walk-ins, events and on-the-go contacts and then easily send messages to contacts interested in just a particular service,” Belonwu tells TechMoran. “We wanted a system that will easily organize the contacts we get on our website so we don’t have to type in manually. We wanted a system that we can use to host a simple form for our programs and events. We wanted to be able to send SMS and emails to these contacts easily.”

After a few questions and surveys, Belonwu says they realized that lots of people and companies have this same need, and they thought it would be great to solve it. This gave birth to MyWorkSet.com which currently has hundreds of users, some of them paying users.

MyWorkSet users only have to pay for SMS and emails used on MyWorkSet. All other services are free. The firm has not received any round of funding and is currently bootstrapping but building it has not be so easy.

“Planning and developing MyWorkSet took a good chunk of our time and energy looking at it from Opportunity cost point of view,” Belonwu says. “Since we are bootstrapping, each day we had to convince ourselves that MyWorkSet is the way forward and is worth every bit of the energy put in.”

Though they are not the only ones doing this, MyWorkSet says their ability to pull these three integral parts of any business together is their selling point – Contact management, SMS and emails. This means users do not have to export and import from one tool to the other to get things done.

He says their competition is doing bits of what they do, like contact management, some doing SMS and some emails but not in its entirety. Belonwu has hope in the future of enterprise startups in Africa and says the enterprise apps market is still a budding market in Africa and fortunately, the awareness is increasing and gradually businesses are begining to gain trust in home grown applications. With more collaboration and commitment, he says Nigeria will produce the next great thing after Google or Facebook.