Kenyan Wall Street interviewed Kenfield Griffith, the CEO and co-founder of Nairobi-based mSurvey to understand the company’s role and experience in the untapped market of the consumer experience in Africa.
What is mSurvey
mSurvey is a platform operating in Kenya and Nigeria that leverages on the mobile phone to collect consumer experience data on behalf of companies to help them understand their customers’ pains and delights.
The platform was launched in 2012 with the aim of using the most important communication device in Africa – the mobile phone – to “connect with and analyse consumer-focused data that would be invaluable to businesses of all sizes wanting to actually know what their customers were thinking and what their experiences were.”
According to Jumia’s 2017 mobile trend report for Africa, there are 960 million mobile subscriptions in Africa indicating an 80 per cent penetration rate.
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The mSurvey Consumer Experience and Feedback Platform
mSurvey’s platform connects companies to their customers allowing them to collect credible data through real-time mobile conversations.
Griffith said: “What we have found is that so many companies are still using traditional pen-and-paper questionnaires and surveys, but this method is not only ineffective time-wise, it is also extraordinarily […] impossible to understand the customer within the necessary context and at scale.”
Therefore, mSurvey’s platform solves this challenge by using cloud computing connected directly to mobile network operators, allowing companies to access feedback directly from their target consumers in real-time.
“We have a fully integrated and intuitive web interface that allows [companies] to design structured conversations, and push questions as chats to the mobile phones of a targeted customer– whether it is one, one thousand or one million conversations at scale,” he stated.
Once SMS questions are sent through the mSurvey platform, customers can reply at their own convenience while mSurvey “aggregates, assesses and analyses” the feedback as it is sent. At the same time, companies can view the results “illustrated on a visualised data stream.” The platform gets a 3X response rate from consumers.
mSurvey works with business-ready companies that want to understand their customers better. The company has worked with Safaricom, Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), and Java House Africa.
Recently, mSurvey in partnership with Safaricom launched the Lipa Na M-Pesa service which allows merchants in Kenya to access customer feedback through the M-Pesa platform.
mSurvey also offers a Consumer Wallet to companies wishing to understand their ‘offline’ consumers and their spending habits.
“Our Consumer Wallet aggregates information such as [consumer spending habits] to paint a picture to understand the Kenyan consumer over time, where we can build a picture of consumers’ wallet size, wallet share and spending breakdown,” Griffith asserted.
The Kenyan Consumer Market
The company says Kenyans are willing to pay more for customer service and ready to forgo unnecessary expenses for products that add value to their lives.
During a Customer Service Week held in November last year, it found that two-thirds of Kenyans (67 per cent) were willing to pay more for customer service while 97 per cent of Kenyans were happier with customer service now than five years ago.
These findings indicate that improved customer service can drive business growth in the country and that businesses are prioritising customer service in their strategies.
The Challenges and Opportunities
According to the CEO, the company has faced challenges such as building product interfaces that are user-friendly and accessible to consumers and creating “the infrastructure to support the technology.”
“Building a tech business in Africa is challenging. What we are doing has not been done on the continent before. So we have really been spending time and resource in building a platform supported by scalable infrastructure,” Griffith explained.
Nevertheless, the opportunities in the market are vast. “What keeps us going, the reason we continue to build is the sheer scale of the market opportunity right in front of us. Consumer spending in Kenya in 2017 alone was 3,470,673 KES Million and is expected to trend around 3,192,685.00 KES Million in 2020.”
Future Plans
The company hopes to keep on “powering millions of conversations for its clients and creating real value for the companies we work alongside by building deeper and more meaningful relationships between them and their customers.”
mSurvey secured $3.5 million funding in April this year, an investment which has helped it to increase expertise within the team, scale its partnerships, and invest in technology. Furthermore, the investment will help them expand into other African markets.
“We expect to be central to the consumer revolution that’s currently underway on the continent. And we expect to do it harnessing the power of the mobile phone. The infrastructure is there, and the climate is right for consumer-led discussions, so now we continue to build in the short term, and promote our brand and our platforms and our clients’ incredible work, to focus on a long-term goal where mSurvey is synonymous with consumer feedback,” Griffith concluded.
