CUSTOMERS

Our broad customer base encompasses the full spectrum of individuals and organisations across Kenya. We classify our customers into two main categories: consumer and enterprise. Consumer customers are individual purchasers of goods and services, while enterprise clientele includes business of all sizes, ranging from small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) to large corporate firms. Our customer base grew by 5 per cent to 29.6 million in total this year.

MONITORING OUR PERFORMANCE

We continue to use the Net Promoter score (NPS) to monitor customer satisfaction. NPS measures the likelihood that a customer would recommend Safaricom to other businesses or friends, based on his or her overall experience. NPS is measured separately for consumer and enterprise customers. Our ongoing NPS targets are to be the number one integrated communications service provider by a margin of 5 per cent relative to our nearest competitor for consumer customers, and to grow our NPS by 10 per cent annually for enterprise customers. The following table presents a breakdown of our NPS.

As the preceding table illustrates, our Enterprise NPS improved significantly during the year. In terms of our Enterprise NPS, we attribute the growth from 12 to 26 per cent to several factors, including the continued strengthening of the dedicated Enterprise Business Unit (EBU) call centre Care team, our improved turnaround times for resolving major faults, and the migration in-house of our fibre network customer management, which has given us better control of network performance and the end-user experience.

CONSUMER CUSTOMERS

In order to service the differing needs of our large consumer customer base more precisely, we divided consumer customers into four major segments in FY16. Despite the political turbulence experienced during the year, our consumer customer base grew by just under 1.5 million customers and we continue to enjoy nearly 70 per cent of the consumer market in Kenya.

* These figures reflect the adjusted definition of ‘active’ customers (from 120-days to 90-days) requested by the CA.

We attribute most of the growth described in the preceding table to gains made following: the launch of our successful Mtaani promotion — a roadshow of entertainment and information that travelled around the country and interacted with customers directly, giving them easy access to customer care and helping them make informed decisions about the products and services best suited to their needs — and the continuation of our Dandia acquisition initiatives, which included extremely competitive data bundle and affordable handset promotions, together with a special Tunukiwa offer and a 15 per cent bonus on recharge via M-PESA.

We also introduced our FLEX and Safaricom Platinum products during the year.

ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS

Enterprise customers are split into three major groups: Large Enterprises; Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs); and Small Offices-Home Offices (SOHO). We currently have a presence in over 196,000 enterprise customers, which represents an increase of over 72,000 customers from the previous year. This growth can be attributed to the acquisition of 23,777 SME and 62,042 SOHO customers.

The SME and SOHO segments have experienced solid growth during the year. In terms of large enterprise customers, our focus has remained on nurturing longterm relationships and up/cross-selling in this market segment.

Delivering value to our enterprise customers

During the year, we experienced continued growth and acquisition of SME and SoHo customers by offering business payment solutions and tailored mobile GSM solutions. We are satisfied with this growth, but believe that there is still an opportunity to drive additional growth based on the addressable market opportunity. The large enterprise customers still account for most of the enterprise revenues and within this space we will up/cross sell new segmented propositions.

Looking ahead, we want to continue to offer enterprise customers real-time monitoring of services and an enhanced billing service, together with an improved self-service portal.