Conexus paves the road for automotive sales and service standards in Africa

Jake Orpen Managing Director of Conexus remarked that “Africa presented many obstacles in terms of accessibility and language, so it is understandable that there was a lot of anxiety from the client at first.”

Conducting research in Africa presented many challenges for the Conexus team. To name a few:

• There is a lack of resources available in the various African countries, where technology is less advanced and customers are less accessible.
• Another issue was language, who can speak which dialect and what about accents?
• Different time zones across the continent could affect timing of delivery and demand odd working hours.
• Limited bandwidth.
• High telecommunication costs.

Despite all the hurdles, Conexus was able to successfully penetrate this market, contacting up to 700 customers per month, using a system called Tactix. Tactix is an advanced post service follow-up system which provides real-time feedback from customers. It is web-based so there are no investments in hardware and software; reports are available anywhere where you have an Internet connection.

By receiving data from a previous days service or sales event, call centre agents were able to contact the customers within 48 hours. Customers were then asked a set of questions which reflect whether they were happy with the service received. Using this real-time feedback, Conexus provided relevant feedback to the client and are also able to provide a trend report through continuous tracking as well as rank dealers and staff in terms of performance.

The project was implemented for distribution in Kenya, Tanzania, Mauritius, Zambia and Ghana. Not only has the project proved to be a huge success but customers also responded really well. Very interestingly it was found that African customers appreciated the attention and were more than happy to have their voices heard. Orpen commented that “in many cases it was difficult to keep the interview short, a sharp contrast to what has been experienced with South African respondents.”

On a broader scope, it has been a great achievement for Conexus who were able to provide extremely useful feedback to the client and already the client has seen an enormous improvement their sales and service offering.

Africa was thought to be unreachable but Conexus has shown that is able to acquire and handle international call centre and customer management projects. “Having expanded our expertise, Conexus now have a base on which we can grow and strengthen,” Orpen concluded, saying that “our client is so happy that they have asked to extend the project to include other African states.”