You will almost certainly have come across a story about how data is changing the face of our world today. Maybe because there is more data being generated, analysed and stored today than ever before.
From capturing online transactions to analysing social media interactions and wading through information flowing to/from our devices -- that’s a lot of data.
However, driven by new thinking, new technology capabilities and the general drive toward digital business, the usage of data is changing radically.
Speaking with Adetoye Aguessy, it is clear one area that has been strongly influenced is customer experience.
From Benin Republic to the world
Customer experience is a term used to describe the product of interaction between an organisation and a customer over the duration of their relationship.
From a business perspective, a good customer experience can mean higher customer retention, faster revenue growth and lower operating costs.
However, because customer experience survey often entails collecting customer feedback to improve on their experiences or analysing trends so as to improve customer sentiment about ones company, it becomes too much of hard work for many businesses.
But inside Cotonou, a company is quietly working to help enterprises across the globe solve this problem.
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RightCom, as it is so called, builds customer experience management platforms which in turn helps businesses to better understand their customers’ needs.
“As technologies that can capture and analyse data proliferate, so too will businesses' abilities to contextualise data and then draw new insights from it. What we do at RightCom is simply channelling that mechanism into the customer experience industry,” says RightCom CEO, Adetoye Aguessy.
For six years now, since starting operations in 2012, RightCom has relied heavily on data collection and analysis to help as many companies across the globe to meet their growing customer demands.
How it works
Ever visited an organisation and noticed them deploy a queue management system (banks and shopping malls for instance) to control inflow and outflow of traffic? The solution just might belong to RightCom.
Armed with its many proprietary tools and software, RightCom caters to the needs of so many clients. A typical end-to-end RightCom solution combines interactive surveys and other data-capturing mechanism with analytics to collect and analyse customer data.
For instance, one of its products, Right Capture -- a facial recognition/data device -- can analyse a customer's facial expression and tell whether they are happy about a product or not. It is usually installed in the vicinity of the client, which majorly are big enterprises like banks, telecoms, healthcare and retail operators.
When its not deploying surveys (through email, SMS, chatbots and call centres) or using its facial recognition product, RightCom has several other products it goes to market with (achieving quality customer experience).
“As long as it solves a customer experience problem, RightCom has a solution for you,” says Adetoye aptly.
There is a global demand
The customer experience market globally is huge. As of last year, global spend for big data and business analytics was $130.1 billion. The figure is expected to hit $203 billion (12% increase) by 2020.
Although the African customer experience industry is still nascent, Adetoye is of the opinion that the growing middle class in Africa's rich economies are contributing to the demand for customer experience in Africa.
“Go and ask most of these (premium) phone manufacturers why every year they keep upgrading the quality of their phones. The more money the middle class population have, the more their demand for quality service,” he explains.
For a successful upsell to take place, companies need deploy quality customer experience so as to be able to understand the factors that trigger customers.
Even RightCom is able to operate in 20 countries, run three offices in different parts of Africa (Ghana, Mauritius and Benin Republic, its headquarters) and have more than 100 companies across the globe on its clientele base. Not only that, annual licensing fee for its products is typically in the region of $300 - $6000. Evidently, there is validation already for this market in Africa.
Low competition problem in Africa
Adetoye believes African players aren't making grand entries into this market as they ought to.
“There are not as many pan-African companies as RightCom in this space. When we have to bid for jobs, it is usually against Western companies,” he explains.
Nigeria, which happens to be RightCom's second largest market, is particularly doing a lot of data collection in the private health sector. Also, with an estimated 50-million-strong middle class population (almost the population size of South Africa), there's more money to be made from customer experience servicing in the Nigerian market.
In Côte d’Ivoire likewise, two out of three telecoms operators use RightCom for customer experience.
“The few businesses that have a semblance of competition tend to lack the holistic approach that sets RightCom apart. I think those who are smart and customer-centric started investing in customer experience 4 to 6 years ago.”
But despite the seeming lack of competition in Africa, RightCom still plans to maintain a strong outlook when it comes to customer experience servicing in Africa.
“While I wish there were more people in the African customer service space, our ultimate goal is to be the only provider in every single country in Africa,” says Adetoye.
One client onboarding can be a huge sell for RightCom because at times it can mean working with them in all the countries they have operations. And this well translates to financial gains for RightCom seeing that up till date the company hasn't raised a single external funding.
