Safaricom 2018 Sustainable Business Report

53 INTRODUCTION OUR BUSINESS OUR MATERIAL TOPICS STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT 2018 SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS REPORT NEW E-COMMERCE PORTAL TO OPEN UP NEW MARKETS We launched our e-commerce portal, Masoko , in November 2017 to help stimulate the nascent e-commerce market in Kenya. The portal connects consumers, merchants and vendors to each other and allows them to trade a wide array of goods and services online. The portal launched with close to 200 vendors offering over 20,000 products. While it has been slow to gain traction, we have learnt much during the year and used this experience to improve the platform, such as enforcing much more stringent quality control measures to ensure the integrity of products on offer, which resulted in the number of vendors reducing to just over 100 high-quality suppliers. We have begun a process of improving the user experience and are looking at ways of growing the service in FY19, including an exciting collaboration with the DigiFarm app. S D G 1 0 New IVR service offers visually impaired customers independence and convenience An expression of our commitment to the SDGs and Goal 10 – Reduced Inequalities, in particular, we launched a new Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) M-PESA balance enquiry service for visually-impaired people in December 2017. Visually-impaired people are vulnerable to fraud when they transact on M-PESA because they must rely on third parties to handle their cash deposits and withdrawals. Moreover, the thefts are often only discovered much later, when the visually-impaired person shares their M-PESA PIN with a different third party and asks them to confirm their balance. Our new service enables a visually-impaired person to check and hear their M-PESA balance by following oral prompts on our adapted customer service IVR system. The new service has been an instant success and already handles an average of 1,500 enquiries per day, which surges to 2,500 enquiries on average per day during the first and last weeks of the month.