South Africa’s mbora, an African based early stage tech company developing IoT and solar based technology to create connected sales and distribution outlets has launched mbora Smart Booth platform to give providers immediate access to advanced performance management data.
Leveraging the latest in IoT and solar technology, mbora delivers performance and operational data streams to enable more efficient and effective Agent and Customer management for booth-based sales and distribution outlets.
According to Adrian Raisbeck, mbora’s co-founder and CEO, “It’s been a highly challenging and rewarding journey but it’s incredibly exciting for our outstanding team to be an African business at the cutting edge of IoT for high performing customer interfaces. We’re passionate about supporting businesses that are sustainably developing African communities by enabling access to crucially important financial and micro-insurance services. We support our customers by improving visibility of their Agent networks and optimising their distribution and customer experience. For our customers, this obviously translates into a direct impact on their customer retention and loyalty while improving their market share.”
The Smart Booths have a suite of IoT sensors detecting customer footfall and queues along with customer agent performance and behaviour; solar powered lighting, security and device charging; digital displays to deliver direct promotions and 3rd party advertising to customers and agent education as well as intelligent data streams facilitating visibility of individual and collective booth performance.
The Smart Booths can be deployed either as a complete system or as a retrofit to existing booths, transforming the basic booths that are currently widely deployed across Africa into IoT enabled, advanced customer engagement hubs. Both the complete and retrofit systems also come with IoT enabled security that automates detection, deterrence, denial and response to unattended booths after hours.
mbora represents the maturation of IoT technology where organisations are looking beyond making home appliances smart, towards a future where IoT delivers significant capabilities and commercial returns.
mbora has also developed a specially designed and equipped containerised hub, providing improved and more secure facilities for cash management. mbora’s hubs act as micro-branches able to offer more complicated products or services, as well as offering second line support to booth/kiosk networks out in the field.
mbora has achieved significant traction since its first pilot in Malawi in 2016 and is currently rolling out its Smart Booths in partnership with early adopters in the mobile money and banking domains.