Sinch, a business that offers communications platform as a service (CPaaS) integrated with SAP Service Cloud, partnered with Zimele Technologies to help southern African utilities by empowering their contact centre agents with support with multi-channel customer engagement for its customers to do business with BPC, enabling Sinch to deliver a superior customer experience.

Nicholas Kitsi, ICT Manager from Botswana Power Corporation, says: “We always envisaged being a ‘digital utility’ and when we started implementing this solution in 2021, we used a traditional PBX for customer engagements. We saw omnichannel as an opportunity to improve the BPC customer experience cycle. Once we started using Sinch Contact Pro, interactions started growing. There was a significant improvement in our accessibility. There were also compelling project economics with a good return on investment.”

Zimele Technologies rolled out full-fledged Sinch contact centre solutions with all channels, chatbots and SAP integration for the Botswana utilities, and also implemented a contact centre solution for the City of Tshwane.

Ryan Miller, Senior Sales and Account Manager Africa at Sinch, explains that Sinch is an endorsed partner to SAP and works in Africa through select partners like Zimele Technologies. “Sinch, together with SAP, enables customer experiences on any channel,” he says.

Many utilities running SAP and moving to SAP Customer Service technology are simultaneously harnessing Sinch technology to reinvent their customer experience, says Miller. “Our largest installation in Africa, with Zimele Technologies, has 630 users.”

Bongani Mgayi, Executive Head of Marketing at Zimele Technologies, says: “Zimele Technologies, which started as a small firm, is now a significant player in this market. We are a Sinch partner and a SAP Gold partner working with major industry partners, utilities and state-owned entities in South Africa and Botswana. These include the Botswana Power Corporation, the Botswana Water Utilities Corporation and the City of Tshwane in South Africa.”

Marc Emert, Customer Experience Manager at SAP in Africa, notes that although customer service is critical, not all organisations deliver great customer service. He says cross-department communication, and making the right customer data available to agents, are crucial to enabling citizen-centric engagements.

“The value proposition from a SAP and Sinch point of view is connecting the back office and the front office to provide the agent with a 360-degree view,” Emert says. “SAP Service Cloud delivers proven business outcomes – we are seeing a 50% improvement in service agent efficiency, a 12% improvement in customer retention and 10% uplifts in net new revenues.”

He cites one customer, who achieved over $1.5 million savings on customer care expenses and a 99% CSAT rating within a year of go-live.

Constance Sibanda, SAP CX/CRM Specialist and team lead at Zimele Technologies, says: “The solution comes with a mobile app so agents can attend to customer complaints and queries anywhere, anytime, and also offers dashboards, reporting and marketing capabilities for organisations and self-service features for customers. Whether customers prefer traditional or digital channels, they can engage with the utility on their channel of choice and agents will have the information they need to resolve their complaint or query.”