Safaricom 2018 Sustainable Business Report

70 INTRODUCTION OUR BUSINESS OUR MATERIAL TOPICS STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT 2018 SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS REPORT Delivering value to our suppliers We meet with our suppliers every year at our Annual Suppliers Forum to hear their concerns and exchange ideas and information with them. During the event, we conduct a survey to assess their perceptions and levels of satisfaction and confidence regarding Safaricom. We use the feedback gained through the survey to adjust our processes and offerings to partners. This year, we commissioned an independent firm to survey our suppliers and the overall 'satisfaction with Safaricom' level reported was 94 per cent. Reasons offered for the high level of satisfaction included the improved payment turnaround time through the iSupplier portal of 19 days on average, and our more straightforward contracts, with clearly defined service levels. Areas for improvement that were raised by suppliers during the survey included the tendering process — from submission periods to the communication of outcomes and negotiated rates — and the level of communication provided by Safaricom staff. We have already begun to address these concerns by introducing a dedicated helpdesk to respond to supplier queries and we intend to improve our levels of communication through periodic emails to suppliers, mini-forums for specific supplier groups, and by holding debriefing sessions with suppliers at the end of tender processes. DEALERS We have the same network of 400 ‘active’ dealers across Kenya that sell data, devices and airtime on behalf of Safaricom as we did in FY17. We continue to believe that this is the right size of network to support the market and so we are not actively on-boarding new dealers at the moment. Our focus remains on helping each individual dealer achieve greater volumes and success. Delivering value to our dealers The elections and prolonged drought constrained the trading environment during the year and so we supported dealers with capital financing to cushion them against these effects and decreased consumer purchasing power, in particular. We undertook country-wide training of our key dealer outlet managers during the year as well, providing them training in basic finance skills and book-keeping, stock management and customer service skills. We also hosted our Annual Dealer of the Year Awards (DOYA) to recognise and reward dealers who have excelled in different areas of the sales environment while maintaining high standards. We branded an additional 47 dealer activation vans during the year and have branded 200 vehicles in total to date. The vans were especially useful this year as dealers were able to participate in our successful joint market activation road shows, such as Safaricom Mtaani . We also supported dealers in meeting the regulatory subscriber registrations requirements with our Know Your Customer awareness campaign and the Subscriber Registration App, which automates as much of the registration process as possible. AGENTS After the significant growth experienced in FY17 and our successful regionalisation programme, our network of M-PESA agents grew slightly in size during the year to 156,000 agents. As with our dealer network, we believe that this is the right size of agent network to support the market and so our growth targets for the next two years are the on-boarding of only an additional 14,000 agents in FY19 and 10,000 in FY20. FY18 FY17 FY16 FY15 M-PESA agents 156,000 130,000+ 100,744 85,756