Telkom South Africa (Telkom), Africa’s largest integrated communications company, was at a crossroads. The company was exposed to high churn risk as a result of its much-criticized service approach and increased competition from new players. Further, the company was challenged by issues outside its control such as saturation in the fixed line (landline) market and decreased revenue from its traditional income services. The telecom giant turned to us to develop a customer-centric approach to overcoming these obstacles. The goal: protect the subscriber base while developing next-generation offerings that would contribute to long-term growth.

We partnered with Telkom to define a customer-centric vision by facilitating workshops with the executive team, and benchmarked its current customer-focused capabilities against cross-industry best practices using our proprietary IDIC framework. We also created a current state customer journey map and proposed a customer-centric roadmap of more than 70 initiatives over a 30-month period.

From the roadmap, 24 projects chosen were “quick-win” implementations, generating near-term results and building momentum for the overall program. The first steps of engagement focused primarily on designing and developing core customer capabilities, including contact center strategy, data strategy, analytics including value- and needs-based segmentation and churn analysis, customer portfolio management, enhanced forecasting for network deployment, and change management for its employees.

Telkom now refers to its customer-centricity roadmap as an internal and external communication tool to demonstrate its dedication to customers. This resulted in a complete turnaround in terms of Telkom’s perception in the marketplace and was strongly praised by consumers. Apart from the strategic importance of this project and expected long-term benefits due to the changes resulting from the strategy, Telkom saw significant financial benefits within the first 12 months.