Co-founded by twins Anthony Muraya and Edwin Muraya, Loyalty.co.ke aims to be a ‘Yelp‘ for Kenya, allowing customers to review brands or firms and compliment them for good service or voice their displeasure for bad service.
According to Anthony, Loyalty ensures brands or companies respond accordingly and address the customers concerns unlike calling internal customer service departments which has proved ineffective. Launching on June 4, Loyalty claims it’ll bring sanity to corporate customer service in the country, especially, the poor service given by telcos such as Safaricom, Airtel, Orange, Yu-Mobile, Equitel and the new Sema Mobile.
“Our business model is based around the companies and not consumers,” says Anthony. “Loyalty.co.ke is a subscription service, meaning that companies will have to pay a certain monthly fee based on the volume of complaints received.”
Though not so logical as firm can get these for free, Loyalty says the fee will give companies full access to the Consumer Complaints with all the information of the complaint such as the incident, staff responsible, branch and contact to be able to respond accordingly.
With Loyalty, Anthony says with a simple search, business people will easily find data to make decisions whether to do business with a firm or not especially consumer-focused business like banks, supermarkets and transport companies.
The firm says all the complaints posted on its site will be automatically shared on its social media platforms to reach to a wider audience while at the same time celebrate those with excellent customer service. The firm is also working on a partnership with the consumer federation of Kenya (COFEK) to encourage more consumers to report incidents of poor customer service and compliment firms whenever they do better.
As a local reviews platform, Loyalty is a great initiative by the founders. However, with the advent of social media, the founders have to prove themselves better than WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter which are real-time and collaborative, allowing friends and family to join conversations to compliment or bash a brand. Loyalty will therefore struggle to gain market share against Twitter and Facebook regardless of the explanation the team gives.
