Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, Chairman, Board of Directors, Nicholas Nganga and Steve Chege, Director of Corporate Affairs during the release of Safaricom Limited Annual Report held at the Bomas of Kenya.
In his speech during the Safaricom AGM held on September 2 2016, Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore admitted that the firm is not providing its customers with the best experience when it comes to customer care.
To address this issue, Collymore said Safaricom planned to increase Safaricom’s customer care capacity by four times to make it more responsive to its customers’needs.
“We know that we are not providing our customers with the best experience when it comes to customer care,” said Collymore. “That is why I was pleased to announce today that in line with our continued strategy of investing in our People and Customers, we plan to increase our customer care capacity by four times.This will entail hiring 600 new staff to join our existing customer care team, and will make what is already the biggest customer care facility in the region even more responsive to customers’ needs.”
According to Collymore, the 600 new people will help fix some of the capacity issues the firm has faced as it tries to respond to the over 400,000 calls it receives every 24 hours from its customers.
As the biggest telecom in East and Central Africa, Safaricom serves over 25.1 million subscribers offering over 100 different products under its portfolio. Recently, the firm launched Blaze, a youth-focused sub-brand. With annual revenues in excess of Kshs 150 Billion, this year Safaricom invested Kshs 32.13 billion in infrastructure providing over 78% of Kenya’s population with 3G coverage and providing 2G coverage to 95% of Kenyans. It’s M-PESA service has over 23 million customers and over 100,000 M-PESA Agent outlets countrywide.
Serving this huge number of customers turns into a nightmare with an estimated team of less than 300 people handling customer care.
“The aim of this initiative is to improve our services and make sure we are offering custom-fit products to our customers,” added Collymore. “This means that we are now able to respond faster to the needs of our customers. We have also given our dealers the power to do more for our customers.This will allow us to manage more customers and provide more services through more than 250 outlets all over Kenya in the coming year.”
With its Ksh32 billion investment into its network last year, Safaricom expects to cover 80 percent of the country with 3G coverage as well as push towards fibre and advanced technologies such as 4G to expand its data footprint and provide better connectivity to businesses and homes.
Safaricom says it has rolled out over 560 sites on 4G in over 20 towns across Kenya and has committed to connect 23,000 public primary school to the internet for free.
