The Acting Managing Director of 9mobile, Stephane Beuvelet, in this interview, speaks on the company’s commitment to enhancing customer experience. Emma Okonji brings the excerpts:
It has been almost a year that the new executives of 9mobile took over the company. What have you been up to in the past few months?
Basically, what has happened for almost a year now, since the takeover on November 12, 2018, is that we have done a lot of things. We had a full strategic plan in place and one of the achievements we have recorded is mainly about resuming communications because the company has been silent for about quite a long time. We are ready to start again to engage our customers. You have probably seen some of the campaigns we did earlier around the magic promos; the partnership we had with WhatsApp, and we did some expansion of the network. We have also launched a couple of innovative services.
Recently, the company secured a loan of $230 million from the African Finance Corporation (AFC). What are your plans regarding this loan, and how do you intend to use it to improve network capacity?
The first result of the injection will happen in the next couple of weeks. We are almost set to start massive rollout of our infrastructure; we are planning to roll out 4G at a minimum of 16 cities, some existing and other new cities. For example, we are going to launch 4G in Enugu, Sokoto, Owerri and Eket among others. Our focus is to help the company to renew its coverage, network extension and continue to improve our quality of service.
What were the criteria for the selection of these cities?
We believe that these are cities where there is much demand for data. We believe that 4G is an enabler for doing business, for entertainment and for solving problems for Nigerians. There is a long list of cities where we don’t have 4G, and this is really good news for the company to be able to start again and be able to offer superior quality of service to our customers.
9mobile is partnering Reanna Nigeria Limited to carry out a pilot of smart off-grid technologies. What do you intend to achieve with the project?
This is part of our innovation for financial inclusion. What we found out is that in the past, there was no economical way to provide coverage in rural areas, so we found this partnership to be very effective in providing coverage in rural areas. This is a proof of concept for the company to provide innovative solar-based satellite solutions, which is low-cost and will allow for coverage in remote areas.
Your company has lost a lot of subscribers. How do you hope to regain these subscribers and add new ones to the network?
There are two reasons why we lost our subscribers. The first one was because of lack of investment and that is being corrected. We see that this is one of the main killers of the company and some of the rollout examples that I gave you will definitely restore the trust and confidence of our customers in our capability to expand and sustain this operation. I think that is one thing that is very necessary.
The second thing we are going to do is to intensify the communication because as you know, customers are very sensitive to what they see. They need to know what the latest offer is. A combination of aggressive rollout and aggressive communication will allow us to resume growth. Like I said earlier, innovation is very important. 9mobile is very focused on providing services, which are close to our core values, especially quality of service of our products. We want every customer that comes onboard to have an ultimately good experience.
Also, we want to make sure that we can serve all our customers; so, customer service is equally important. We want to understand the need of the customer; we want to be able to provide solutions. We are not providing services, we are providing solutions to the problems of Nigerians. I believe that innovation is an enabler for everybody, there is a lot of disruption coming from technology and I think we want to give all these innovations at the fingertips of the customers.
How is 9mobile tackling poor quality of service?
There are two major things when it comes to quality of service. The first one is the environment. A lot of disruption of the network, which is not specific to 9mobile, is due to continuous destruction of infrastructure. Road construction is always destroying our fibre and we have to manage this problem. We also encounter unstable power supply. We need to know that this is a very expensive country to operate in as a telecom company because most of our sites are powered with generators. First of all, you have to manage the environment. Secondly, you need a lot of resilience, which has a cost to get the best quality of service, which is what we are working on at 9mobile.
We have actually created a very resilient network. The reason 9mobile has the best internet quality of service is because we are expanding the bandwidth to the maximum as much as possible and we have fast access and low-latency, among other factors, which are contributing to the quality of service.
Are there other innovations that you are looking at deploying to improve your network?
There are a lot of them. 9mobile is known for its innovations, that has been one of our key values. We have a programme called the QIC meaning Quality of service, Innovation and Customer service that we are trying to drive right now. We have introduced some innovations this year and some are planned for the future. We launched the first e-commerce called e-shop and you can find basically all our products and services there. It has a very innovative financing offering where you can buy smartphones with 12-month instalments and we believe that it would be very interesting for some of our customers.
There is also one where we enhanced our financial technology capabilities. There is a product called 9pay. We are already using artificial intelligence. This year, we launched at least two initiatives on artificial intelligence. One is the chatbot, which Nigerians can use with 9mobile; they can interact directly on WhatsApp with our customer care. Also, for the farmers, we have the new service called Iska weather service. With a shortcode, you can find out what the weather would be like in the next couple of days and it is a quite popular service, which uses artificial intelligence as well.
What are your plans for 5G technology?
5G is part of our roadmap. There are two main things to help us get to 5G in this country. The first is access to spectrum, which is still being debated at the regulatory level. After that there is no reason 5G cannot come into this country anytime soon. I think there are some operators including 9mobile that are thinking and starting to look at 5G.
