By Ephraim Oseji

Dabo Owen Etela is the CEO/Co-Founder AlphaCX Platforms, a customer support platform that turns complaints to happiness and profit. In this interview he speaks about customer satisfaction, retention, and business growth.

Excerpts:

How did you find yourself in this space?

My personality is curious, gritty, and tolerant to risk. I have failed many times and it longer scares me, I just pick up the pieces and make something new. I have been tech-savvy since the days of Windows 95, wearing different caps at various stages of my life. From the graphic designer, hardware and network engineer, server administrator, web developer to product manager. I am now focused on providing leadership for people and our product. We started out by offering services to enterprises with Microsoft, Bitrix24, and custom solutions. We implemented solutions for IBEDC, Coronation Merchant Bank, Cardinalstone Registrars, Tropical General Investment (TGI) and others. It turns out that most of our customer’s key requirement was Process or Service desk automation.

Deploying a software takes from a few minutes to hours. However, implementing the user requirements ends up taking months. We also observed that the user requirements of our customers were about the same across companies. They want the solution to integrate with their core business application or database, they want scheduled escalations, their channels connected, and single sign-on with their identity system. The real challenge was integrating with the core business application as the data was siloed and decentralized. We decided to build a product to significantly eliminate implementation time by enabling native integration of data across sources.

How has the shift from services to product been?

My biggest relief is that we can make a true change by acting on customer’s feedback. When you are a value-added reseller, you have two options; one is to customise the software to meet customer expectations. The other option is to send customers feedback to the software providers who may not find it a priority, as they have bigger customers to attend to.

What are your challenges?

Talent is the key challenge. Our market is underserved, we have to build for Africa first. CRM applications built for the US markets meet the required compliance. The same applies to products built for the European market. We have to build products to meet our compliance standards, regional requirements and customer type. Infrastructure is another challenge, we have to build twice as hard because of our environment. It makes sense to add SMS as a channel to access customer support, just as we have USSD in financial services. Internet subscription is expensive when you look at the average purchasing power in the country. So we build with the inefficiencies in mind. Another challenge is in order to fully comply with the NDPR Policy, customer data should be stored locally but then, not many businesses can afford servers. Nigeria is not a region in any of the big three cloud providers, South Africa is about the only availability zone in Africa. It’s mostly the banks and large organisations that can afford to maintain on-premise or private cloud stacks.

What is the market opportunity?

Complaints are the market opportunity, validly we complain a lot in Nigeria about services. We have made it our job to provide the tools for service providers to resolve complaints. We believe if customers have less complaints about services, they can focus on things that make them happy and continue to patronise the service provider. On the metrics side, the customer relationship management software business is doing about a billion dollars this year for Africa alone. It is projected to grow at 15% annually over the next four years. More businesses will realise how CRM tools can help nurture better relationships with their customers, improve productivity and drive up revenue.

What is the future of Customer Support?

I can say Artificial Intelligence but it’s happening already, we can look at broader use cases where virtual agents become more emotionally intelligent, such that they can have meaningful conversations with people either via voice or messaging. I believe we will see localisation of Natural Language Processing where users can interact with AI in local dialects. Omnichannel will include the Internet of Things (IoT) where users can access support from a wide range of hardware devices. Interacting with customer care from your refrigerator, car, television, and other appliances. This has also started happening, however, it would become more mainstream Remote contact centers for distributed agents will also become mainstream, of course, this is as a result of the pandemic. And since businesses are still trying to wrap their head around Work From Home, it will lead to some innovations such as Face-to-Face video communication support as an alternative for walk-in customers. In countries like Nigeria where the internet and power is still a challenge, contact center software will run natively on mobile devices since they have longer battery power. In addition, desktop appliances that can run with minimal internet will become a thing. A productive workforce is critical to providing excellent customer service.

Fundamentally, the innovation taking place in the customer experience industry is aimed at knowing the customer better, so businesses can nurture a much more personal relationship with customers. Businesses will no longer wait for a customer to complain, they will become proactive in solving customer problems. Customer service roles in the future will become more similar to customer success roles where you ensure customers are getting the maximum value from your product or service.