[Kenya Business Week] Power clinics prove customer is king

An increasingly disenfranchised customer base that has now been empowered by technology to voice their complaints on poor service delivery is inspiring companies to find innovative way of reaching out to clients and addressing their concerns promptly.

This has been rubberstamped the recent launch of ‘Power Clinics’ by power utility company Kenya Power which says the clinics are meant to improve service delivery and enhance customer satisfaction. The company is among those that receive the highest number of customer complaints owning to the number of clients it handles. It has invested in numerous strategies to reach out to these customers including creating a Whatsapp platform to communicate with industrial customers,  launching a customer engagement programme to encourage round the clock economy, constant upgrade of  its customer management system and an overhaul of its corporate structure. 

In sustainable development and poverty reduction, Village Enterprise, an NGO, has raised $3.5m of working capital  to provide first-time entrepreneurs who live in extreme poverty with seed capital, training and mentoring to start more than 4,600 small sustainable businesses in rural Kenya by 2020. Other organizations like IFAD have introduced such projects to empower enterprising rural men and women in Kenya. This, even as data shows that poverty in Kenya has declined significantly, but unlikely to be eradicated by 2030.

On innovation, Kenya Pipeline Company has completed the migration of its manual procurement to the new Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) platform. This will offer an online e-procurement platform through which KPC will automate its entire procurement process. The automation follows the launch, years back, of a platform that allows organizations to get reliable and vetted suppliers for various products and services electronically,a spirited campaign by  Kenya to address runaway corruption. This as experts agree that focused intent to reduce cost of operation and ownership of ICT infrastructure is still the driving force behind any ICT procurement and integration strategy today.

Pandya Memorial Hospital in Mombasa has joined the list of hospitals that are automating their business processes and improve the cost-to-value structure. This week it implemented the SAP Business One technology to automate its inventory. In Kenya, SAP has previously introduced mobile cloud based solution for cervical cancer screening.