M-KOPA elevates efficiency with a single platform

M-KOPA is a fintech platform catering to underbanked customers through digital micropayments and a pay-as-you-go financing model for smartphones, electric bikes, and cash loans that fueled its rapid growth. But success brought challenges for its customers, agents, and IT teams as the company scaled. Customer interactions were increasing significantly, revealing challenges with unscalable infrastructure, disjointed systems, inability to integrate with existing platforms, and a lack of granular customer insights.

“We were growing so fast as an organization, and our biggest challenge was that our platforms were not scalable,” says Nancy Sangoro, director of customer service and retail operations. “Our agents were using multiple systems that were not integrated, and this situation magnified many inefficiencies.”

The company’s legacy ticketing was not built to handle a huge volume of interactions. M-KOPA sought to standardize on tech that would scale, integrate well, and lead to efficiency and increased agent productivity. “We wanted solutions that were intuitive and that our agents would enjoy using, while also providing call center managers and team leaders visibility into the incoming customer inquiry volumes,” says Sangoro.

The company implemented Freshdesk and Freshchat to give agents easy tools to respond to customers faster and provide better insights into customers’ questions and issues. With Freshservice, M-KOPA consolidated IT service management and automated critical workflows for its nearly 2,000 agents across five African countries. AI chatbots and an internal knowledge base helped resolve 39% of all queries, freeing agents to focus on more complex queries. M-KOPA’s Net Promoter Score soared to 46%, or “good to great.”

The company

M-KOPA has paid out over $1 billion to unbanked customers through digital micropayments and pay-as-you-go financing for smartphones, electric bikes, digital cash loans, and other critical resources. Many of its 4 million customers rely on the fintech company to fund aspects of their solo businesses. Its 3,000 employees in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa handle 1 million digital payments daily.

The challenge

As a fintech company serving underbanked customers across five African countries, M-KOPA faced several critical challenges as it rapidly scaled. “Because our core business is not in product development, and our product teams were chasing other priorities to help us scale, we did not invest in a unified support solution,” says Sangoro. The company struggled with disjointed systems, including spreadsheets, emails, and an outsourced telephony system from 3CX.

As the number of daily customer queries increased with the company’s growth, agents became overwhelmed without adequate self-serve options or a knowledge base to help troubleshoot customer issues. A lack of automation for reporting and tracking purposes meant that the company was not dialed in to a granular understanding of customer interactions and agent performance. “We wanted to be able to track the customers who visited our service center and then be able to track the journey that the device took from the customer’s visit to the repair and back,” says Sangoro. This data would help inform decisions around staffing, product improvements, and process improvements to help customers in real time, including with issues like smartphone repairs.

The solution

In 2019, the company adopted Freshdesk as a comprehensive ticketing solution, followed by Freshchat for real-time messaging. In 2023, M-KOPA adopted Freshservice to improve critical workflow processes for IT, HR, and travel and procurement departments. Unifying IT and customer experience (CX) operations on the Freshworks platform facilitated seamless ticket data sharing between teams, accelerating issue resolution and enhancing distributor satisfaction. The centralized platform also yielded cost reductions and operational efficiencies by consolidating IT and CX functions under a single vendor. 

Freshdesk’s omnichannel solution meant customers could contact M-KOPA through calls, emails, and chat, which provided self-serve options, while agents received them in a unified view that included the customer’s complete history. Customer-facing chatbots helped resolve routine tickets, allowing agents to focus more on complex issues like smartphone repair requests. The platform tracked responses in a dashboard that helped M-KOPA’s leadership make data-driven decisions around staffing, process improvements, and product and service updates. First response times fell, and the company began to meet its SLA for ticket resolution.

Freshchat provided M-KOPA a way to engage with customers through real-time messaging channels like WhatsApp. “Freshchat’s user-friendly UI is very similar to popular messaging tools, which minimized the learning curve for both our agents and customers,” says Sangoro. 

With Freshservice, IT, HR, and procurement departments gained efficiencies and transparency into the IT service desk. A self-service knowledge base was rolled out for employees to find quick answers to common questions, and an easy-to-use portal gave employees a way to submit and track requests, significantly reducing the workload on the service desk. 

M-KOPA also deployed Freddy Self Service AI bots with country-specific names, tailoring the experience to each market. These AI bots were configured to handle top chat and call drivers, providing customers with fast information about products, terms and conditions, and return policies. They also offered pictorial steps for common issues like unlocking phones or checking balances.

“Most of our customers use their M-KOPA device as a tool of trade,” says Sangoro. “So it's crucial that they can self-help quickly—if their phone locks due to non-payment, they need to be able to get quick self-help tips on how to pay."

Impact

Since implementing Freshworks solutions, M-KOPA has improved its customer service capabilities across five African countries. Nearly 2,000 agents now use these tools, resulting in impressive metrics:

• 200,000+ chatbot sessions

• 39% bot resolution rate

• 62% chat channel adoption

Sangoro attributes M-KOPA’s success to its investment in CX: "The fact that we've been very intentional about our customer experience has led us to invest in the right tools with Freshworks,” she says. “Which means we can deliver a great experience for our customers.”