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Customer services

IT'S ALL ABOUT SERVICE

By Sven Lunsche

We cannot win in a price war with Vodacom. We have to rely on service and quality to differentiate us from the competition," says MTN customer service operations group executive Kgabo Badimo, who is responsible for the services portion of the equation.

He has a staff of 1 200 (about half of MTN's staff complement) to assist him , but it is still a huge task, considering there are more than 4m customers to deal with and his department has about 20 different divisions. Responsibilities range from customer billing and call centres to relationships with retailers and legal action against nonpayers.

At present, in its effort to go for "quality, not quantity", MTN is trying to win back some of the high-end prepaid market it lost to Vodacom and Cell C. At the same time, it is trying to gain the lead in the corporate market.

"The market positioning affects how we sign up customers and how we segment our service divisions to deal with prepaid, subscriber, small and medium-sized enterprises [SME] and corporate clients," says Badimo.

The prepaid market - accounting for about 80% of MTN's customer base - is the most labour intensive. "We need to grow market share in the prepaid sector again and reduce the number of bad debts," says Badimo. MTN has rejected fewer applications for prepaid contracts - 11% by year-end from 26% in the past year. Badimo also wants to keep bad debts at 1,3% of total income - in January this year the figure was as high at 2,8%.

Badimo has set up a "nursery environment for customers we now accept who previously would have been rejected. We remind them by SMS that they are reaching their predetermined limit, follow up with phone calls and, with prearranged consent, cut them off once their limit is exceeded."

He says many MTN corporate clients ask to put their staff on prepaid contracts

because it allows for better financial management.

In the postpaid (subscriber) market, the problems also require intervention, but to a lesser extent. "More than half our contract customers are on debit orders, amounting to about R110m/month and we have a 97% collection rate. "The remaining postpaid customers pay by other means and even here we have a good success rate - we are hitting 90% of customers without engaging in any type of credit control," says Badimo.

The credit-control process starts when payments are not made on the due date, which automatically triggers the process. Most queries are dealt with quickly as customers simply forget to pay on time and act immediately when contacted. The debt management process begins with interaction with the customer. "Technology helps us as we can cut off contracts at any time or soft ‘suspend' customers, which means they will receive calls but can't make any."

The debt-management process ends with the involvement of the legal action division and the use of outside attorneys. Only when legal action fails does MTN write off amounts, which, according to Badimo, are about R3m/month.

Nonpayment is less of an issue for MTN's business market, which is further divided into SMEs - loosely defined as professionals and companies with fewer than 100 staff - and corporates, with more than 100 employees.

However, significantly larger staff numbers and resources are dedicated to the business market in the customer relationship management section of Badimo's divisions. "Our corporates have account managers who are their primary contact point for everything from technical to billing queries," he says.

"Beyond that, both corporates and SMEs will be automatically directed to our call centre's BIC [business interaction centre] or DIC [dealer interaction centre]." Technology again is used extensively by identifying the phone numbers and directing the calls to the appropriate call divisions.

For the nonbusiness base, the 173 (prepaid call centre) and 808 (postpaid call centre) are staffed by 500 people, who deal with all calls .

Customer satisfaction is difficult to gauge statistically, but there are a few numbers that provide a guideline to the success of customer services:

Starting with customer applications where 8 000-10 000 new applications for contracts are dealt with each day.

"We have brought the turnaround time down to 10 minutes," says Badimo.

He cites sophisticated credit vetting and assessment systems as the key to the reduced turnaround time.

At the call-centre level, the answer rate is 92%, though call volumes have

increased sharply and the MTN product range has diversified significantly.

Finally and, perhaps, most importantly, the churn rate is starting to fall, says Badimo. Churn measures the percentage of customers who switch service providers .