Telecom is a mammoth industry in the African continent. Year-by-year, this industry is registering growth rate. The current telecom players across Kenya and other African countries have begun to concentrate their efforts on ensuring a greater level of customer service.

1. The African telecom market and its quest for service excellence
Telecom is a mammoth industry in the African continent. Year-by-year, this industry is
registering growth rate. The current telecom players across Kenya and other African
countries have begun to concentrate their efforts on ensuring a greater level of customer
service.
The companies understand the value that their existing customers bring to their business
and that they have to keep them engaged if they are to remain competent and profitable
in the market.
With this strategy in mind, they have begun to work more on up-skilling their staff,
particularly the staff placed at different customer touch points. What they want from their
staff is get into the shoes of their customers, so they can understand the pain points of
the people and resolve their queries to the best of their abilities. They want their staff to
be able to communicate better, sell better, and resolve queries better. For this, they
adopt different methodologies, team building exercises, product / service knowledge
workshops, and all other training programs that have the potential to help their staff
perform better in their work life.
Some smart telecom companies went a step further when they consulted the training
companies who provide corporate training as well as vocational education in Africa,
including vocational training in Kenya. Now these training companies consist of teams of
professional trainers who keep on developing their programs based on industry
demands and the best training practices. These trainers actively conduct a needs-
diagnostic study of the staff that would take part in their programs; the study may include
detailed discussions with the management / senior staff, interactions with the
participants, and the common challenges faced by the telecom industry; once the study
is done and the findings are out on the table, the trainers go on to customize their
program (s) to make it help the participants with the issues that hamper their productivity.
Telecom companies seem to be impressed with the results that they get out these
programs that are designed to enhance the product / service knowledge, communication
and selling skills of their staff.
Many of these companies also leverage the expertise of their training partners to set up
training academies to keep on educating and training their employees to keep them
aligned with the objectives of the organisation; sometimes, they also leverage their
partnerships to design & deliver vocational training in Kenya or the country they
operate from, to up skill the local youth with vocational education and training, and help
them take up jobs across leading industries including telecom.
Author bio: –
Africa is a continent full of young population who can take up the job roles offered by
telecom as well as other emerging industries there. The companies are increasingly
partnering with leading training companies to equip their employees with the skills that
would help them improve their everyday work life. For more on this and vocational
education in Africa, please read our other articles.