Thank you for the invitation to speak with you on this 2023 World Quality Day with the Global theme Quality – realising your competitive potential. You have asked me to make this theme, the topic of my speech as you mark the 2023 World Quality Day.
First let me commend you old colleagues at #MTN and several generations of MTNers after, for keeping up the industry and market leadership of MTN-Nigeria.
In the context of the topic, Quality- realising your competitive potential, I thought it might more useful to speak to the topic from a practical real life perspective and share experiences.
I will therefore like to modify the topic of my speech to “16 Quality Management Lessons / Reflections from the Cashless Implementation”. Even though the lessons are from the financial service industry, they should have wider applications beyond, in the context of general quality #management lessons. Some of the learnings might also be useful to you as you seek to transit your business from Teleco to a Techco.
Banks with the largest IT departments, that used to be traditionally renowned, were the ones that struggled most during cashless. Their historical army of engineers had built hard coded and multilayered #tech infrastructures that were difficult to modify overnight. The non-modular nature of the legacy system even meant that new problems were sometimes created in attempts to to solve current problems. The story on the street then, was that their customers had to wake up at 3 am to do transactions to have any hope of success.
Olu Akanmu.
For the purpose this speech today, I will like to define #Quality as that which is delivered when customer expectations are met , when the service promise is kept. During the #Cashless implementation, we saw the wide challenge by financial industry players to meet the expectations of customers with a lot of pains experienced by customers in the #ecosystem. Reflecting backwards, below are some 16 Quality Management Lessons and Reflections from the Period.
1) Failure on quality promise or implied quality promise of incumbents can rapidly change the market structure of industries. Market share lost or wallet share redistributed may be difficult to gain back. Opay grew its franchise over five months December 2022 to April 2023 by 3X and 4x multiples on many metrics including Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and Daily Active Users (DAUs) which have now significantly remained sticky.
2) Quality – reliability delivery, the simple promise that the payment will work, will go through and be delivered on time and with speed, especially in critical services like payments could create potential virality that drives customer acquisition multiples especially when everyone else is failing. Many informal traders who wanted to get paid, sold Opay to their own customers for #payments to them and among themselves including Uber drivers who all virtually came on Opay, because of the confidence that they will receive their payments.
3) It does not matter what the engineering or the operations metric says, if good #customerexperience are not being delivered at the front end. Engineering or operational metrics not aligned to customer experience are either vanity metrics, misaligned or not measuring the right things to support quality – defined as good customer experience, reliability, the simple promise that the payment will go through instantly. We saw many engagements among industry players (senders and receivers of payments) where the engineering teams would say, they have checked or tested their platforms, and all were fine, yet payments were not being delivered to customers accounts.
4) To the #business, a transaction failure may look like a mere number, a micro percentage, To the customer, it is working capital disappeared for the small #MSME, it is inability to buy food for family or medicine for a sick child. Everyone from the front and back end should therefore think and connect to the customer implications of back end operational/ engineering metrics in the life of a real customer.
5) #Agile and flexible infrastructure are critical to delivering and adjusting rapidly to transaction surges and reliability challenges. The implications of a native modern #digital infrastructure of #fintechs like Opay and others, compared to the legacy core analogues systems of traditional players were so manifest. It was a real life demonstration of all that we used to read in technical white papers about the flexibility of digital platforms.
6) The weakest link in the quality system ultimately determines the quality experience. Quality delivery is more of a function of the weakest link in the infrastructure/process or system architecture of a business. Many #banks have digital mobile apps, truly digital but which still had to talk and interphase with core banking applications which have been built over time, though modernised but still significantly analogue at core. The beautiful digital apps of many traditional players failed them, when transactions surged because the core banking application was not flexible/agile and could not be expanded overnight. Total Quality Management or Total Quality Principles had never been more true.
7) Banks with the largest IT departments, that used to be traditionally renowned, were the ones that struggled most during cashless. Their historical army of engineers had built hard coded and multilayered #tech infrastructures that were difficult to modify overnight. The non-modular nature of the legacy system even meant that new problems were sometimes created in attempts to to solve current problems. The story on the street then, was that their customers had to wake up at 3 am to do transactions to have any hope of success.
8) A lesson from above is that resource endowment in terms of capital may not always correlate with the capacity to deliver good customer experience. A key lesson here is that customer experience delivery may not sometimes be about how much money/ resources you have for some of the incumbents. On the day of reckoning, it is the flexibility and agility that are intentionally designed into the system that will guarantee the reliability, speed and customer experience desired.
9) Traditional players and incumbents because they have been successful under stable, non-disruptive and fairly predictable environments and because of sometimes short term focus on cost with the mindset that environment would always be stable, that you can even linearly project the future from today and the past , tend to under invest in building redundancies and similar capabilities . It is always fine in the short term until major ecosystem shocks that test resilience of their tech platforms and their capability to deliver reliable and quality customer experience. #Fintechs orientation are the opposite of this. For fintechs, customer experience is differentiation, and they invest in it with a long term view as priority.
10) The standard of reliability and experience delivery is determined beyond industry boundaries. Whether you are in #financialservices or #telecoms, customers today compare you with the standards set by #digital #ecommerce players- Amazon, digital media- Spotify and many more who use smart intelligent systems, AI and ML with good design thinking to deliver good customer experience are now very critical.
11) One of the quality management issues at the period was the impact of dependencies on the larger ecosystem that are not within your control such as switches and third parties who sent or received payments from you. For many customers, who do not see the larger ecosystem and your dependencies , they will hold you responsible for the success of their transactions. Your partnerships and ecosystem collaborations and relationships can be very material in delivery of the desired quality of customer experience. When complemented with smart and intelligent routing and infrastructure design to minimise fatal single point of failure, proactive factoring of larger ecosystem bottlenecks and critical nodes of capacity constraints into infrastructure design, it could make a large relative difference in the customer experience.
12) Smart intelligent systems- AI, ML are now playing a critical role in customer experience, making customer journey, navigation more intuitive. There is a saying on the street that while you are still thinking in your mind, Opay seems to know who you want to send money to, and before you finish typing, your payment is done.
14) Quality, Japa and Talent – Many of the traditional banks lost their Tech talent to Japa affecting their Capacity to deliver consistent quality customer experience. #HR and #talentmanagement have a critical role in the quality program. If critical talents are missing in operations/engineering and service experience management, quality and good customer experience cannot be delivered. The Fintechs have coped with the Quality and Japa challenge because of the nature of their infrastructure which are largely cloud infrastructure which implies that their tech team do not have to be based locally. They can tap into wider tech talent pool overseas to support their platforms while delivering local experience. This also helped to retain local tech talents who moved abroad but continue to work remotely, unlike traditional incumbent players. This is another advantage that modern cloud-based infrastructure has apart from agility and flexibility- it also gives flexible options for talent sourcing.
15) Cybersecurity and secured platforms are now an integral part of quality and customer experience to be delivered. As digital transactions have scaled with complex ecosystem dependencies, so has also been the challenge of fraud in payments which has a big impact on customer experience, trust and reliability.- all metrics of quality. Designing dynamic and smarter intelligent security into payment platforms has become an imperative for good customer experience.
16) Quality is culture and life. In fintechs, we don’t even talk about it as a conscious lingo or lexicon. It is deep in the subconscious mind of the tech organisation with obsession for the customers. Measuring all metrics of reliability of performance at critical nodes, designing the system for smart failure recovery and continuous improvement etc are intuitive part of daily work without people talking the word quality.
About author: Olu Akanmu, CEO, Board Advisor and Executive in Residence at Lagos Business School made this presentation as Guest Speaker at MTN Nigeria World Quality Day Celebration held Thursday, November 9, 2023.
