In 2020, Covid-19 rendered many people jobless, however, the pandemic also became the basis for establishing lots of businesses for innovators who could turn around the table.
Jennifer Jemedafe is one of such people who took the bull by the horn when she founded Retention Concierge, a customer consulting and technology company after she lost her job during the height of the pandemic.
During the Business Half Hour show hosted by Nairametrics, she explained how the platform helps organizations make the best buying decision with regard to technologies and digital transformation journey and also helps them serve their customers better.
For her, the challenge at inception was being able to innovate around her situation and being able to find the opportunity because – as of the time when she started out – she didn’t know about tech, she just wanted to consult for businesses.
She said, “I notice that people were still trying to adjust, and consulting wasn’t what they needed at that time. However, the opportunity was that people needed to digitize and do it very fast because most organizations and contact centres still operated using desk phones, onsite telephones and desktops in the office. But people needed to move to cloud, they needed to be able to serve their customers from anywhere and that was the game changer for me.”
Another thing that slowed down her journey is not being a salesperson. “It would be easier if I as a founder started my career in sales; for me, I wasn’t into sales before then. But over the years, I have improved significantly, however, that journey of improvement made things slower because for you to drive an organization, you have to have some sort of core skills that would help identify when a person is not steering the team in the right direction. So not being a salesperson was a challenge for a while until I started getting structures in place,” she said.
Retention Concierge operations depend on customer segment and tie as the platform sells to customers across all industries whilst tailoring its service to the customers. Jennifer stated that the platform is able to organize training for organizations in order to close the gap that they have in terms of skills relating to how to serve their customers who simply need to scale up their customer services core.
She said, “For clients, it’s a technology need core. Some businesses are moving from analogue to digital while some businesses have never used technology before. In that case, we provide advisory services by proposing the type of technology that is needed and we facilitate the buying and implementation process.
“For other companies, we help them deploy their service. Usually, businesses would just send out surveys and find out that customers don’t respond. We help businesses strategize around how to collect customers’ feedback, analyse the insight, and then take action on them.”
Apart from selling technology and providing services, the platform has an ultimate goal to be at the forefront of digital transformation in Africa as it pertains to advocating for the culture of Concierge.
“The more internet penetration that happens, the more we will see digital transformation. We are moving in the right direction but the penetration awareness and the penetration of what the internet can do for you and the access needs to improve,” she said.
Retention Concierge picks values from companies that are very obsessed with customers but in terms of modelling, it wants to be able to be a standard for how African transform across different sectors to provide excellent care. “We like some brand for setting value but ultimately our goal is to become the ones that transform through tech through collaboration through centric tech collaboration,” she said.
NOTE: Don’t miss out on the next Business Half Hour programme brought to you by Nairametrics. Tune in to Classic 97.3 FM every Monday by 8:00am to get inspired by startup founders and top business executives.
