KAMPALA – KCB Bank Uganda and Kenya customers will now be able to interact with the Bank via the popular messaging service WhatsApp.
The Bank has deployed the Digital Customer Service platform designed by Sparkcentral, the customer experience solutions provider with Headquarters in San Francisco, US.
This will see KCB Bank become one of the leading African financial services companies approved for the WhatsApp Business solution.
The platform will create a centralized communication hub for KCB digital customer care interactions, allowing the Bank to effectively leverage the most-used messaging systems to take communications to the next level as part of an overall digital transformation effort.
In addition to WhatsApp, this includes helping customers with inquiries through Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, but also bi-directional SMS and modern live chat.
“We are redefining the customer journey, which is critical to the delivery of excellent customer experience. As part of our digital transformation efforts, we are enabling our platforms to collect real time data on our customers, then analyze and use it to make educated decisions on how to improve our operations on an ongoing basis,” said Job Njiru, the Customer Experience Director at KCB Bank.
“The platform combines enterprise scalability with ease of use, making the software a smart investment in terms of our long-term growth. We want to see our customers getting the answers and information they need from KCB as quickly and conveniently as possible and on the platforms they want,” he added.
The investment is in line with the focus on seamless customer onboarding, self-service enablement and excellent customer management by tapping into emerging technologies and popular platforms like WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is the largest messaging platform in the world with over 1.5 billion monthly active users, making it a dominant platform in markets such as Africa, Europe, and South America.
According to the 2018 KPMG Banking Industry Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted across Africa, digital is the new normal for many customers. Christoph Neut, Sparkcentral’s Vice President for EMEA explains:
“The massive adoption of communicating through messaging apps like WhatsApp by mobile consumers worldwide, especially on the African continent, is disrupting traditional customer service delivery models. New customer expectations call for new technology.
We designed our Digital Customer Service platform to make it easier for companies to keep up with the consumers who define customer care as personalized service that includes their digital channels of choice. We’ve found that integrating popular social messaging apps like WhatsApp are leading the charge when it comes to driving down customer service costs while driving up customer experience”.
Towards the end of last year, KCB posted another major first when it was ranked first in Net Promoter Score across all banks in Kenya based on a question that was posed to the respondents: “Would you recommend KCB?” “This initiative to be the leading Bank on digital channels like WhatsApp demonstrates our ambition to maintain our NPS ranking long-term,’” said Njiru