iSON Technologies Transforming Customer Experience in Africa

By peter oluka

Most conversations today revolve around enhancing customer experience through digitisation. Research has revealed that over 72 percent of global businesses are highly eager to prioritize their customer experience journey through tangible improvements.

Yet and not surprisingly, according to the annual CX report by Forrester (2016), globally, companies lose over $340Bn due to poor customer service/customer experience management every year. This is a startling number.

In his presentation at the recently concluded ‘Africacom’, titled; ‘’Transforming Customer Experience – Shifting Gears at Bigdata Stream’’, Akshay Grover, Chief Growth Officer at iSON Technologies, stressed on the fact that new age digital services/ operations have raised the competitive bar in every sector. In addition, to capture the opportunity in its entirety, company executives should with immediate effect, embrace a new operating model that exponentially improves the digital customer experience.

According to Grover, through iSON’s digital consumer expertise and service-operations work with leading practitioners, the company has distilled elements that it believes are critical in shifting away from the present uncoordinated efforts within organizational silos to launching an integrated operating model that is organized around the entire customer experience lifecycle, right from the point of purchase.

He went on to explain how iSON Technologies has successfully transformed customer experience through creating a holistic self-care application, developed for a major telecommunications giant in Africa. Reduction of inbound customer-care calls by 15 percent, elimination of long ‘call-waiting lines’ and more 2 million subscribers shifting to use the app within 3 months of launch clearly reflect sustained positive results.

Grover further stated that iSON Technologies expedites an experience based approach to transforming their customer profile.

Rather than digitizing lots of elements, they focus on selective transformation, singling out a handful of customer journeys that really matter within key segments; mapping how those journeys flow across functions, channels and device along with identifying where the key pain points lie. Re-imagination and innovation lead to processes intersecting cleanly with social, mobile, cloud technology & artificial intelligence to deliver a superior customer experience.

It is no surprise that a lot of digital journey transformations struggle to succeed, when we consider that the execution of the same is a complex, multidimensional task.

A constant evolving global market and paradigm shifts in consumer dynamics require fast, frictionless “real time” insights into multiple different areas for decision making, especially in customer-journey management and design. It requires a combination of traditional transformation elements—such as rigorous, top-management commitment and steering—and cross-functional teamwork (including the agile delivery of technology) along every phase of the journey. Nonetheless in the long run, the reward is definitely worth the while.