With over half a century of independence under its belt, Kenya’s economy has been through quite the transformation, with strong GDP growth year on year and economic exports with a value of over $5.7 billion.
However, Kenya is now on the verge of another economic breakthrough, with sights firmly planted on the technology industry as a new and lucrative revenue stream for the country’s population.
To learn more about this next important step for the country, we asked Ryan Murphy, Technical Services Engineer for Connex One in Kenya, for his insights on Kenya’s position in the global tech landscape and what impact he thinks customer engagement (CX) technology investments will have on the country’s future economic success.
See what he had to say in our interview below:
Q: How important is technology for the Kenyan economy?
Kenya has become known as the Silicon Savannah, due to its progressive information and communications technology sector growth of an average of 10.8% annually since 2016. This sector has become a significant contributor to economic development and job creations, with spill-over effects, felt in almost every sector of the economy.
Q: Which technological advancements do you see having the biggest impact?
Kenya is already seeing great results from the growing telecommunications and customer engagement industries within the country, with new technologies making a big impact on how businesses are interacting more effectively with existing and potential customers.
Based on the governments’ continuous vision for Kenya to be a largely Africanized economy, whose industries were producing for regional markets and where tech is at the heart of commerce, improving customer engagement technology will enable Kenya to become a Contact Centre Hub for the world, providing a much needed boost to local job creation and stimulating economic growth.
Q: How can Kenya utilize CX technology to expand its global presence?
Kenya has a growing telecommunications industry, with investments bolstering up the ICT sector to allow for high speed and secure telecommunications. Opportunities in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector are making waves in Kenya, but there remains a need for the country to increase their BPO quality and market presence.
BPO sectors deliver a range of services for both local and global clients, but traditional BPO which are CX and Contact Centre services share services across finance and accounting, legal, IT, Education, HR and knowledge sectors to name a few. As the African continent continues to receive attention when it comes to Offshore BPO locations, this year South Africa was awarded the best offshore BPO location for 2021 due to its commitment to improving regulations and compliance, which brought about massive economic growth and job opportunities.
Q: How can Kenya replicate South Africa’s BPO success?
Kenya can follow suit by creating highly regulated and modernized telecommunication regulations. To secure the continual attraction of a multinational market, your regulations need to meet international standards. This means when implementing CX platforms, it’s important to utilize customer engagement software that is fully compliant. As the expanding landscape of customer engagement creates new levels of demand for reliable customer engagement systems, the importance of quality management from CX providers has become more important than ever.
One of the most effective Quality Management Systems for ensuring CX businesses remain compliant is achieving the ISO 9001 Certificate. ISO 9001 demonstrates to new businesses and markets that your CX platform adheres to the highest quality standards and holds exceptional competency. Since Connex One implemented the ISO 9001 certification, we have received increased performance on our reporting and compliance measures and secured the trust of our users from around the world.
Q: What does an effective Customer Engagement Platform look like?
Remaining relevant to customers demands means that as a BPO or contact centre provider, you need to offer multiple channels of communication to suit customers preferred method of communication, and it needs to be instant.
In this age of instant gratification, consumers demand to have high quality and prompt customer service. An omnichannel solution facilitates communication over multiple channels including email, WhatsApp, live chat, and voice. Improving on efficiencies and CSAT scores, all communication is integrated into one singular place – so if an agent was to lose contact, or a client communicates via a different platform on a different day, the CX agent can simply pick up where they last left off. By consolidating all your enquiries into one central point and having the ability to distribute where necessary has seen businesses increase savings by 35%.
Additionally, having an Omnichannel solution will provide a never seen before solution to customer communication, reducing users average handle times (AHT), meaning more customers will be serviced more frequently and increasing customer contact rates for businesses.
Q: How can Kenya compete with the global CX industry competition?
As software continues to develop, CX platforms that can support customer engagement efficiency also need to develop to enable CX businesses to perform against international competitors.
Artificial Intelligence innovations such as Connex One Athena interactions and Sentiment AI Analysis can automatically provide businesses with visibility on staff politeness and opportunities to upsell, through key phrase analysis and entity recognition – ensuring agents always stay that one step ahead.
It has become increasingly important for businesses to understand why they are losing or gaining customers, as such insight is invaluable in helping to improve CX processes and boosting overall customer satisfaction and retention rates.
By using a CX platform that can provide detailed interaction reports and sentiment analysis, firms can avoid their business managers having to manually monitor each conversation for quality purposes; reducing the possibility of unfavourable behaviour from CX agents and leading to increased overall customer satisfaction.
Q: How do you keep your CX platform simple, but also technologically advanced?
Having a solution that is easy to use, yet technologically advanced is key to integrating a platform across multiple sectors, that is suited for various levels of skilled or unskilled agents. Finding that balance is extremely difficult in the new age of technology, where features are continuously developing, but the skills required to utilize these features become intrinsically complicated and advanced. When this happens, the system becomes redundant and does not serve the business purpose. Having a simple user interface that is easy to use front end, powered by a robust system, allowing for real-time viability and control with intuitive data insights will empower agents to perform using the functionalities of the system, achieving the business outcomes.
The simplicity of the Connex One platform allows for easy and seamless training, allowing your agents and management teams to concentrate on what they do best from day one. The minimalistic approach to the design allows us to provide you with exactly the same functionality you will find within any solution at a much lower rate. Knowing that there is no one size fits all approach, and each of our customers has different operation requirements and needs, we can configure our platform to fit those individual needs and grow with our customers on their journey as they continue to expand.
Q: What will have the largest impact on Kenya’s CX Business?
The success of CX in Kenya will largely be based on quality and efficiency. By using a platform that can give contact centres the ability to report to their clients on how their campaigns are performing in real-time with industry-leading technology such as Athena AI, an omnichannel interaction suite will enable agents to handle calls more effectively with the right information at hand.
Having the ability to reroute calls or texts to an agent who is best suited and skilled to continue the call will be a gamechanger.
One of the main reasons why South Africa has been a successful BPO destination is due to their integration of customer engagement platform solutions into their CRM system, improving customer satisfaction and reporting measures to the various BPO clients. South African BPO’s have more to offer than just simple voice services. By investing in technology such as AI, they were able to expand their service offerings to include web chat, email, WhatsApp and social channels, reaching customers 24/7.
Q: Where do you see the future of Kenya’s CX expanding?
Kenya is among the emerging destinations for the contact centre industry. According to Vision 2030, Kenya’s new economic blueprint aims to transform the country into a middle-income country by the year 2030, identifying the BPO sector to lead in creating thousands of jobs.
With upcoming investments for the telecommunication sector and the improvement of quality and performance, Kenya will no doubt continue to attract multinational markets to the region.
To see how Connex One could improve the Customer Engagement of your business, we offer customers a 30-day free trial to try out our platform before making any commitments.
To claim your free trial or request a free demo of our platform, contact our sales team at hello@connexone.co.za or submit your request here.
