Ugonwa Nwoye: How SMEs Can Strike The Right Chord With Customers
The business world could be likened to a large, well-stocked lake with many fishers waiting to get the best with their intimidating arsenal. In such an environment, what is left to small and emerging players is identifying and wisely choosing their fishing hole.
Many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are faced with the challenge of how to win and retain customers in a business world dominated by multinationals and other big players. The solution to this, according to the Chief Customer Relations Officer, MTN Nigeria, Ugonwa Nwoye, is “fishing where the fish are”.
At the Revv Programme masterclass themed “Redefining customer experience through effective customer relationship management and data analytics” which held recently, Nwoye and other industry experts showed more than 100 SME owners in attendance how to improve customer experience while maximising data analytics to scale business growth.
The Revv Programme is another initiative by MTN that brings SMEs together under the mentorship of top business executives and industry experts to relearn, rethink and retool their businesses for growth in the emerging digital economy. The programme which commenced in September aims to reach and support 10,000 small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) across Nigeria.
With a degree from the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, Nwoye possesses business development experience spanning over 20 years. Since ascending to her present position as the Chief Customer Relations Officer of MTN Nigeria in 2014, she has been leading a wide ranging customer operations and oversees business development transformation of the telecom giant.
Beyond the title, Ugonwa Nwoye brought to the Revv Programme panel over 25 years of experience in Strategy and Management Consulting, Oil & Gas and the Telecommunications industry, garnered from work at Bain & Company Inc., South Africa, Mercer Management Consulting, San Francisco and Schlumberger in their Gabon, Nigeria and Indonesia offices.
Those are part of the experiences and skills she deployed in mentoring small and emerging business owners to help them decode the dynamics of changing attitudes of customers, develop innovative business and customer relations models, and make smarter strategic decisions.
Nwoye’s proven strategy for keeping customers and making them happy rests in what she describes as the ‘hands-on approach’.
“Every member of the team that I lead understands this and is how we ensure that you continue to experience effective and high quality service,” she revealed.
As a panelist on the MTN Revv Programme in September, she summed up this strategy in remarking that there is a need for business owners to pay attention to diverse customer channels as they arise and identify tools to drive efficiency and win new customers.
After identifying the right fishing hole, deploying the right strategies to win the customers is key.
“You need to meet the customers where they are. To achieve this, a good customer database is essential. You need to know the kind of channels your customer wants to be reached,” Nwoye advised.
To thrive in a market where customers are active, doing some research, checking on competitors before making up their minds, the MTN Chief stressed the importance of choosing the right strategies to identify customers and how to sustain them. One of such strategies is knowing customers’ history which reduces the amount of efforts business owners make on customers.
“When brands know their customers’ history it helps to build the intimacy that customers have with every brand,” she said.
“When customers go to different channels and they see the consistency in the way they are treated, they begin to build a lot of confidence in the business and they begin to tilt towards loyalty. The amount of effort you make on such customers reduces over time because you have an omni-channel approach to serving those customers.”
