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Services Offered

  • Data Analysis
  • Reputation Analysis
  • Strategic Advisory
We wrote reports on the various briefs and requests from the client. The reports were crucial in keeping the client informed and as a means of documenting the project.

Reporting

Based on our findings, analysis and insights, we strategically advised the client and shared our recommendations. We also regularly informed secondary decision-makers within the firm..

Strategic Advisory

Platforms Used

  • Brandwatch

Results

  • Over ten training sessions with over 100 staff across Safaricom’s major offices.
  • Nendo secured a license with unlimited users

Background and Introduction‍

Safaricom is Kenya’s leading telecommunications company. The firm delivers a range of solutions touching on voice, data, home internet, financial services and agribusiness. Until 2017, Safaricom had primarily relied on external agencies and partners to provide digital tracking and social listening for the $10 billion company.

By definition, digital tracking is a broad term used to explain the diverse needs of stakeholders within the Safaricom ecosystem. Previously, stakeholders would write briefs and engage third-party firms to analyse and deliver reports on various research questions.

About Crimson Hexagon (now Brandwatch)

Crimson Hexagon is a leading social listening platform that merged with rival Brandwatch in November of 2018. The result of this is Brandwatch Consumer Research. A robust and competitive platform to answer market research questions at scale.

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The four critical areas of the platform are:

  1. HelioSight - a search engine for quick insights, keywords and reporting. This, coupled with a detailed review of digital metrics, forms the basis for snapshot reports.
  2. ForSight - by creating a specific research query (also known as a monitor) customer sentiment can be analysed deeply. Crimson Hexagon goes deeper than just positive, negative and neutral sentiments. It allows for the selection of a small percentage of online updates and custom categorisation to explain five different types of positive sentiment, for example.
  3. Dashboards - when there’s a need for real-time insights and data, Nendo creates dashboards to answer critical questions for stakeholders. If at a breakfast event or an essential product launch, the volume of engagement, key influencer, talking points in a word cloud and other real-time visuals are custom-built into a dashboard and shared with stakeholders.
  4. Alerts - Using a set of rules, Crimson Hexagon can alert a range of stakeholders when specific criteria are met. For example, Nendo has created rules such as when complaints about Safaricom’s network reach 10% above the daily average, an alert featuring a sample of the complaints to specific stakeholders. These alerts apply across financial services (M-PESA, M-Shari, FULIZA) and other products and services.

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Nendo’s Role at Safaricom PLC

In 2018 and 2019, Safaricom PLC engaged Nendo as its Digital Tracking agency. This role sees Nendo serve the telecoms firm in two core ways.

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Sourcing and Securing a Social Listening License for Safaricom PLC

Nendo formed a partnership with leading global social listening platform Brandwatch (which merged with Crimson Hexagon in November 2018). Crimson Hexagon was the preferred platform of choice for Safaricom. Nendo, as a regional partner, secured a 2-year license of the tool and provided this to Safaricom PLC.

This remit includes providing support to over 50 champions of Crimson Hexagon within different departments in the business. Nendo has provided training, ongoing support and customer success services to them.

Nendo’s role was to devolve the ability to generate insights from one department briefing a third-party agency, to creating internal champions capable of serving their business units, departments and teams. Since Nendo began, it has held over ten training sessions with over 100 staff across Safaricom’s major offices.

Nendo secured a license with unlimited users to ensure that all members of staff who want view-only access or are prepared to be trained for editing and full access are capable of self-serving on Crimson Hexagon. They can seek support from Nendo directly, or through the Crimson Hexagon champion closest to them.

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Delivering Digital-led Research and Insights to Safaricom Staff & Senior Leaders

In addition to providing the Crimson Hexagon software license to the business, Nendo is retained as Digital Tracking Agency to deliver specialised services for leadership and teams within Safaricom’s business. These reports, created using Safaricom’s business template, are presented and utilised across senior leadership, management and staff levels for decision making.

Nendo provides the following range of reports:

Report
Frequency
Description
HelioSight
Daily, 7AM
This 100-to-300 word email and PDF report sum up the previous 24-hours for the brand with action points, areas of concern and a snapshot of insights. It features screenshots of trending updates, threats to brand safety and high-level insights on behaviour. They set the table for any deep dives that come later in the day, week or month to revisit. A weekly digest of the same is made every Monday.
Brand Tracker
Monthly, by the 5th
The Brand Tracking Report looks into the state of the brand, according to various metrics and areas of interest for key leadership. An important breakthrough of this was developed in April of 2018 when Nendo began to track brand perceptions around mobile data bundles. Specifically contrasting negative sentiment into two specific metrics to be compared month-on-month. The first was stealing concerns. This referred to the number of customers whose complaints centred around the idea that Safaricom was “stealing” from them because their mobile data bundles were being consumed quickly. The second metric tracked price sensitivity. This metric tracked customers who felt that Safaricom was pricier (or less value for money) compared to competitors. As different campaigns, offers, promotions and products were launched, these metrics were compared (as well as more pre-agreed metrics tailored to Safaricom’s priorities).
Communications Tracker
Monthly, by the 5th
Monitoring communications and their efficacy is vital to delivering insights for marketing effectiveness. Nendo monitors Safaricom’s outbound communications and compares this with competitors, including the range of comments, compliments and complaints. Customers tend to have creative suggestions and important responses to communications from the brand. Nendo tracks this with a view to assessing the communications and its engagement, delivery and consumer response.
Campaign Tracker
Ad-hoc
When campaigns are launched by the Brand, Marketing and Communications Team within Safaricom, Nendo is on standby for special reports. During the first week of the launch of the product, campaign, offer or promotion, Nendo delivers daily reports with specific feedback for stakeholders. Dashboards and Alerts are set up to provide real-time data and insights for stakeholders. Nendo also makes content calendar recommendations based on consumer insights during the first week, leaving room for implementation and adjustments.
Intent To Churn/Join
Monthly/Ad-hoc
A hallmark of Nendo’s reporting has been creating and monitoring consumer intent. The “Intent to Churn” and “Intent to Join” charts provide key leaders with a high-level customer view that is future-facing. Using Crimson Hexagon’s artificial intelligence platform BrightView, Nendo has developed a scoring mechanism to classify the customer responses to Safaricom products and services. This allows for existing marketing and communications campaigns to be evaluated by whether they shifted sentiment among the customer base and drove consumer intent to join or addressed intent to churn or leave the service. The implications on this touch on more than just the marketers, as it assists technical teams to keep score and service delivery high to maintain customer experience.
Communications Tracker
Communications Tracker
Communications Tracker

Use Cases

Department
Key Challenge
Nendo Solution
Corporate Communications
Influencer Identification, Engagement and Reporting on Performance and Delivery
With influencers commanding high prices, what is the best way to evaluate success and, keep discovering and sourcing new influencer talent? Nendo, through a series of special reports for senior leaders in this business unit, gave insights and recommendations that saved the business funds, aligned incentives of the influencers and agencies and uncovered micro-influencers to experiment and engage with for upcoming campaigns.
Corporate Communications
Visual Share of Voice
Safaricom’s logo is one of the region’s most recognizable. As part of the journey towards giving insights into this, Nendo performed various analyses of imagery online to spot and highlight the Safaricom logo. This was primarily to search for threats as far as brand safety is concerned. This also allowed a visual share of voice to be calculated; however, there are a limited number of brands from Africa with which to be compared.
e-Commerce
Competitor Tracking and Customer Insights
When serving the team building out Masoko.com, Nendo analysed the online inventory of Jumia, Kilimall and other rivals. This was done, including analysing their social media complaints and comments for further first-person insight. Their websites were analysed for performance, Facebook ads interrogated to understand their promotional priorities and their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages reviewed to determine their content calendars to better understand their marketing objectives. This was all performed to give the Masoko team an edge when understanding their competition.
Research & Insights
Customer Segmentation on Digital Platforms
Safaricom has long prioritised the work of understanding its customers beyond the standard metric for all telecoms companies of ARPU (average revenue per user). Nendo was charged in 2018 to develop a lens to view its digital customers. Using outside insights, Nendo analysed over 130,000 online updates and +20 variables to create a set of digital segments of users.

From internet users who were sparsely using the internet, yet had high-end smartphones to first-time entry-level smartphone users. Nendo also identified a set of key descriptors that the branding and marketing team could incorporate to reach and engage with existing customers, based on how they described themselves.
Research & Insights
Tracking Digital Customer Satisfaction
Customer experience metrics matter in the competitive landscape. Nendo created a model using the six basic human emotions, according to Dr Paul Ekman, Surprise, Fear, Disgust, Anger, Joy and Sadness. From these, Nendo crafted a monthly satisfaction score that helps the business keep tabs on its performance in the marketplace.
Brand & Marketing, Customer Experience
Branded & Unbranded Mentions
Social media teams and brands require a higher level of insight to know the full ‘galaxy’ of terms that customers use when engaging them. Nendo successfully mapped out Safaricom’s products and services, ranked them by their share of voice from customers, and then analysed customer behaviour to find alternate phrases, slang and keywords used to refer to the products.

For example, Safaricom’s financial services platforms include M-PESA, M-Shwari and FULIZA. In addition, Safaricom’s financial service department is an enabler of technology and has key client relationships such as Kenya Power, Nairobi Water, SportPesa, Betika, among other partners. Within this are mentions of Safaricom, its related products and services and other relevant updates where @SafaricomPLC and/or @Safaricom_Care, its two official handles are not tagged.

For these, Nendo created Boolean queries to capture the more extensive keyword network and allow for a full review of the brand to be conducted. This allows the customer experience teams to determine which issues they want to proactively respond to and engage with while maintaining their response rates/times for direct queries.
Software and Information Technology
Digital Customer Journey Analysis
Safaricom has launched a range of digital products, services and experiences. As part of this, there is a need for constant feedback and review to improve.For its Facebook and Telegram chatbot, Zuri, Nendo performed a detailed technical analysis of the natural language processing capabilities and pre-scripted responses from the organisation. This gave technical feedback on improvements and areas of impact, based on the review and experience with customer comments from the year before.

For Safaricom Platinum, the proposition aimed at high-value customers, Nendo was able to identify a user-experience issue that was limiting the number of signups after launch. After delivering a comprehensive user experience review, Nendo recommended the placement of a signup button based on its proximity to the thumb of the everyday mobile internet user in Kenya. Using the top 10 list of smartphones, the screen size (in inches) and assessing placement, Nendo was able to make recommendations for technical adjustments that led to an increase in signups to the service.

Solutions

Nendo’s social listening, data, and insights team are capable of solving a range of challenges. The team frequently deploys and learns different technology platforms to achieve client goals. Nendo excels at its intimate understanding of keywords, local slang and insights into how Africans communicate online. 

Nendo also prides itself on translating asks of different stakeholders from operations, commercial, marketing, sales, and customer experience into briefs that can be solved with public data. Overall, Nendo brings experience analysing millions of online updates from across Africa to the brands that it works with.

Proficiency in Crimson Hexagon and Brandwatch Consumer Research means that the speed of execution is high. Nendo is flexible enough to deploy existing client tools, including providing support, training and customer success internally to stakeholders. Due to the demand for offline analysis of raw data, Nendo also has internal intellectual property of Python and R programming language libraries that are used for data analysis. Nendo has experience in Tableau and other data visualisation techniques to ensure that the insights can be consumed visually as well as in their raw form.

For a demonstration of Brandwatch, kindly email mark@nendo.co.ke to assess the fit for your team. For a consultation on social listening, data analysis and digital customer insights, email mark@nendo.co.ke for a complimentary 15-minute call to map and understand your needs.

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