Customer Service remains a huge challenge in Nigeria, businesses, support agents and customers have a fair share of the troubles. Businesses purchase expensive but complex solutions that are not user friendly, and negatively impact support teams ability to log and track customer issues swiftly.
The failure to deliver customer satisfaction eventually leads to loss in customer loyalty, business revenue and reputation damage, apart from fines that may be incurred from regulators.
This is changing as Nigeria B2B startup AlphaCX Platforms is on a mission to deliver customer engagement infrastructure for African businesses. AlphaCX has built a platform that understands the shared pain points of businesses, which is the need to solve customer complaints with speed and simplicity.
“Time is our most valuable asset as businesses and humans, we want closure as soon as possible”, says Dabo Owen Etela, CEO and co-founder of AlphaCX Platforms.
AlphaCX enables businesses to communicate meaningfully with customers from live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, Twitter, Facebook messenger and Instagram. The product includes ticketing helpdesk, customer feedback ratings, knowledge base and self-service portal. With other features such as conversational support, automated SLAs and ticket distribution, including voice, video and AI capability in their product roadmap. Using AlphaCX, organisations quickly see a 30% overall improvement in responding to customer queries and team performance.
The global customer engagement market is currently valued at $15B and expected to reach $30B by year 2026. The African market is reported to have done $1B in 2020 but has the potential to hit $4B in three years.
“We are going for a sizable chunk of that market,” says Dabo, who has been one of those who believe in African solutions by Africans.
“Most solutions do not meet the requirements for African business, particularly when it comes to enterprise software, it is not one size fits all. Software products have to be built and localised specifically for regions. As cultures are different, so is purchasing power, regulations and processes, which vary from company to company and country to country.”
Dabo Owen Etela, a domain expert in Customer Relationship Management Systems, has delivered customer support solutions for large enterprises such as Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) and Coronation Merchant Bank.
“We have Cardinalstone Registrars supporting millions of customers using AlphaCX”.
Dabo explained that “Compliance is critical for financial establishments operating in a highly regulated landscape like Nigeria. Businesses want to plug their core business applications to deliver personalised service, so we factored data privacy into our customer success strategy”.
AlphaCX has free and paid plans for small, medium and large enterprises, who need to deliver customer-centric innovation to stay competitive and relevant and to meet the evolving needs and expectations of customers.
The team which has been operating in stealth since May 2021, has Dabo Owen Etela as CEO, Keme Kenneth leading Product engineering and Muna Nwuju in charge of customer success.
