Being part of Mobinil’s new Products and Services team, we were exposed to new offers and ideas all the time. One of these projects was in collaboration with the sales department, who were complaining that our shop agents are faced with customers lining up in huge ques just to pay their bill or top-up their prepaid account.
The scope of this project was to find an alternative way to differ the traffic of customers wanting to pay their bills or top-up their account from the shop agents, to a faster and more efficient way and at the same time, allow the sales agents to focus more on more complex situations with the customers.
I was handed this project to lead with a number of stake holders from different departments, I started gathering their requirements and look for a supplier that can offer such a solution. We looked at the whole process and what are the bottlenecks in which we can speed the process and assure the highest customer satisfaction at the same time.
With further research, I found out that most of our customers pay cash, and are mainly prepaid customers that top-up their account with small amounts. which made sense not to avail a credit card option since only 2% of Egypt’s population have credit cards. Another aspect was the human interaction that is needed especially with larger amounts, our customers tend to feel more secure paying to the sales agent. But still the research proved that our customers are mainly prepaid and a noticeable difference can be made by moving forward with this project.
Research made it a lot easier for me set up a specific RFP, along with the Procurement department we came across a supplier that offers a self service terminal that can integrate online with our billing platform and offer such a solution. The next part of this project was deciding where to launch our pilot phase?, Again with some research and history, and with the help of our sales team, we gathered data and sorted out our pilot phase locations based on the highest traffic and transactions, level of education in this area, ratio of postpaid to prepaid customers and amount of transactions.
In parallel to the technical integration with our billing platform, I was working closely with Customer Service department to set up the flow and make sure that we are providing the easiest and fastest journey for our customers to maintain a high level of satisfaction. A number of challenges were faced through out the whole journey, one of them was that the self service terminal does not give back change nor will return the money in case the transaction failed, to over come this challenge we conducted a focus group with a sample of our target customers and asked them what would be suitable for them. The feedback was as long as there is a receipt or a proof of payment they would be comfortable with it, and so we included in the process that if the terminal did not proceed with a transaction and the receipt is given to the customer, the customer can hand in the receipt to the shop agent and the agent will do the transaction for the customer. Also another challenge was mitigated by forcing the customer to enter their mobile number twice as a precaution for any wrong payment that would result in occupying another agent’s time to solve this issue.
The pilot was launched in four selected location and was tested for three months, after their success more terminals were rolled out in other shops. Ques timings went down significantly, the number of transactions through the terminal increased, giving more time for the shop agents to focus with the customer on up selling new services and handling their complaints. The success of this resulted in its implementation in other regions such as Jordan who have a similar market.