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How Kazang Solar (Azuri Technologies Distributor) Leverages PaygOps Features for Call Centre Management
Overview
Call centres are pivotal for last-mile distributors (LMDs) in Sub-Saharan Africa due to their multifaceted role in both sales and after-sales processes. Typically housed within the company, these units often serve as the primary point of contact for customers, guiding them throughout the sales journey, managing payment processing, offering technical support, among others. Their ability to handle such critical functions efficiently makes them an indispensable asset in the entire distribution value chain, given the data and insights they collect can directly impact the company’s decision making. Therefore, LMDs recognise the importance of equipping their call centre units with digital tools that enable efficient and accurate data collection to streamline operations and, ultimately, enhance customer satisfaction.
Leveraging an advanced IT infrastructure enables distributors to automate call centre processes and integrate their myriad of operations under one central hub, facilitating real-time data exchange with third-party apps. By doing so, the organisation can allocate resources more effectively, focus on customer satisfaction, and scale operations more rapidly, ultimately leading to a more sustainable and profitable business model.
Kazang Solar’s experience illustrates this well. Established in 2016, Kazang Solar is a distributor of Pay-as-you-go (Paygo) solar solutions with a mission to become one of Zambia’s market leaders, particularly by targeting rural households and empowering women, so far impacting ∼10.000 households. To push their mission forward, Kazang Solar works closely with its sister company Kazang, a leading micropayment processing service provider; and Azuri Technologies, the renowned manufacturer of affordable and innovative off-grid solar home systems.
As Kazang Solar aimed for scale, the challenges posed by manual data collection in its call centre became increasingly apparent. Looking for automation and centralised operations, the organisation adopted PaygOps in late 2022, a platform that now acts as its core IT system to streamline key business processes. In this case study, we will explore how Kazang Solar takes full advantage of PaygOps’ flexible features to manage its call centre operations efficiently.
Challenges
 | Using multiple non-integrated digital platforms to register and manage customer data still required regular manual input and, consequently, was prone to error, caused information silos and was highly inefficient. |
 | Processing Mobile Money (MoMo) payments manually was tedious, prone to error and caused delays. |
 | Manually tracking product add-ons and replacement of parts caused delays |
Solutions & Outcomes
Prior to adopting PaygOps, Kazang Solar relied on a fragmented IT setup, using Google Sheets for tasks like collecting customer information, generating call lists for customers out of credit, conducting welcome calls, and monitoring call centre agents’ performance. They also utilised a web-based Customer Management System (CMS), a separate customer ticketing platform, and the Azuri Service Platform (ASP) for managing sales and collections of Azuri Technologies products in Zambia.
Today, Kazang Solar’s IT ecosystem is centred around PaygOps, which seamlessly integrates with the Kazang web store, a payment collections platform supported by Kazang's extensive agent network in Zambia. Additionally, a total of 10,148 customers were successfully migrated from ASP into PaygOps. This streamlined IT environment has enabled the digital transformation Kazang Solar sought, significantly enhancing client onboarding, after-sales management, and automated payment processing, leading to centralised data management and improved efficiency in their call centre.
🟢 How exactly do they leverage PaygOps’ Features for Call Centre Management?
🟢 What is the outcome so far?
Lead Review and Client Onboarding
Kazang Solar’s customer acquisition process begins in the field, where their field agents collect basic lead information using PaygOps’ Custom Forms. This powerful feature allows the distributor to create tailored ‘Know Your Customer (KYC)’ forms, ensuring that all necessary data is gathered efficiently by the agents at each touchpoint. Once this information is recorded on PaygOps mobile app, Kazang Solar’s call centre team accesses it through PaygOps’ desktop interface for further vetting and verification.
The call centre follows a structured process to review and onboard leads. This involves vetting potential customers over the phone using a series of customised questions within PaygOps. Based on the responses, the call centre agents either approve or reject the lead. If approved, the customer is officially registered and required to make a down payment to activate their Paygo device, which is installed by the field agent on the same day the customer is registered. Four days into the contract, the customer receives a welcome call, guided by a customised “welcome call” form available in PaygOps, to ensure a smooth onboarding experience and address any initial concerns.
🎯 Outcome
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Automated Payment Management and SMS Notifications
All the payments received across Kazang Solar’s business operations are contained within PaygOps. Through the last-mile management platform, the distributor’s team is able to verify payments received via Mobile Money and the Kazang platform (Kazang Web Store), which enables their Accounts department to carry out reconciliations on a monthly basis.
In this way, the distributor is harnessing the power of automated payments and SMS notifications to streamline payment collections and customer communication processes. By integrating MoMo platforms with PaygOps, the end users can make payments conveniently at any time without the need for direct interaction with agents, thus saving time for both parties.
Thanks to sister company Kazang’s extensive vendor network across Zambia, the Kazang Point of Sale (POS) terminal remains a very convenient option for customers who struggle with MoMo services due to digital literacy limitations. This allows Kazang Solar’s customers to easily transact at any Kazang POS vendor location without the need to visit their installer, making the two payment platforms (MoMo and Kazang POS) complementary to each other.
The Kazang platform is integrated with PaygOps via an API, and all collections processed via the platform are visible in PaygOps, thus customers opting for this repayment method enjoy the same enhanced service provision by PaygOps, such as balance inquiry by viewing the balance on the printed receipt the same way if payment were done via MoMo.
🎯 Outcome
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“Paygops has impacted my work positively as I use it to view the last number that made payment using Mobile Money. This has made it easy to track the customer’s last known contact number in an event that the registered phone numbers are not reachable. PaygOps has also helped me to analyse customer payment trends as seen by their timeliness ratio, a higher timeliness ratio entails a well-paying customer whereas a low timeliness ratio means a bad customer. This way my interactions with customers is tailored.”
Timothy Ngulube, Customer Service Representative (Credit Collections) at Kazang Solar
After-Sales Customer Support
Kazang Solar’s support agents use PaygOps’ Customer Management System (CMS) and its dynamic ticketing system extensively to efficiently resolve customer issues, requests, and interactions, ensuring high-quality support at all times. From this central hub, the team can easily create and track interaction reports, optimise maintenance planning and scheduling, as well as customise and send automated SMS campaigns to customers.
Additionally, PaygOps' comprehensive after-sales dashboard provides call-centre managers and upper managers with real-time access to key metrics and insights into service performance, allowing them to continuously refine and improve the department's effectiveness.
🎯 Outcome
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Add-Ons and Out of Credit Client Management
Given Kazang Solar offers a wide range of products in addition to the Azuri Technologies Paygo devices, the PaygOps Add-Ons feature allows the distributor to provide flexible product offerings and arrange them according to their needs and those of their customers. In this case, Kazang Solar is using the feature mostly to manage their Out Of Credit (OOC) clients and the replacement of faulty devices and parts.
OOC is the status assigned to clients who are behind on their contract repayments. One common cause of OOC is when the customer damages the device, loses a part, or a failure occurs outside the warranty period, and cannot afford the one-off replacement or repair cost. Consequently, the customer stops paying because the system no longer works. Thanks to the PaygOps add-on feature, the company has resolved many of these OOC cases by enabling the customer to spread the cost of the replacement part by paying in instalments. This approach has helped ensure that clients complete their contracts, allowing full payment recovery.
🎯 Outcome
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Agent Performance Monitoring
Kazang Solar’s call centre managers leverage PaygOps system to closely monitor the performance of both their call centre and field agents. For call centre agents, managers track several key metrics, including the number of interactions recorded, collections made against daily, weekly, and monthly targets, and the quality of customer registrations. The quality is assessed by examining the timeliness of early contract management, the number of welcome calls made to new customers, and the handling of OOC calls.
Field agents’ performance, on the other hand, is monitored through metrics such as sales installations and OOC management. To be considered active, a field agent must install at least one unit within a three-month period. Additionally, agents are evaluated based on the management of customers in their portfolio, specifically focusing on their OOC percentage. If an agent’s OOC percentage exceeds the maximum allowable threshold, they are disqualified from receiving a monthly commission. This comprehensive monitoring facilitated by PaygOps ensures that both call centre and field agents are effectively contributing to Kazang Solar’s operational goals.
“Our team is excited with PaygOps. It has improved our overall productivity as we are now using one system for the majority of our assigned tasks, hence we have undivided attention that would come from using multiple systems. This has given us more time to offer quality service to our customers.”
Paul Pongolani, Assistant Manager - Customer Service at Kazang Solar
In a nutshell: How PaygOps is Impacting Kazang Solar’s Call Centre Management
Enhanced Efficiency Through Automation: By adopting PaygOps, Kazang Solar significantly streamlined its call centre operations, reducing the time required for tasks like customer onboarding and payment processing. This automation has minimised manual errors and improved overall efficiency, allowing the company to scale more effectively.
Centralised Data Management: PaygOps' integration of various business processes into a single platform has eliminated the inefficiencies caused by using multiple non-interconnected digital tools. This centralisation has not only facilitated real-time data exchange but also improved decision-making and resource allocation, leading to better customer service.
Improved Agent Productivity and Performance Monitoring: The implementation of PaygOps has enhanced the productivity of both field and call centre agents by providing them with the tools to manage customer interactions more effectively. Additionally, the platform's performance monitoring features have enabled Kazang Solar to track and optimise agent performance, ensuring that operational goals are met.
💡 Are you a distributor of essential products and services interested in automating your call centre processes the way Kazang Solar did? We invite you to discover PaygOps comprehensive offering or contact our representatives, who will be happy to give you a demo of PaygOps’ flexible features.
About PaygOps:
Solaris Offgrid’s flagship fintech software, PaygOps, enables credit to be provided to the bottom of the pyramid for essential products like solar home systems, agri-inputs, water pumps. The end customers pay incrementally via mobile money under a PAYGO model. PaygOps provides the software infrastructure to manage the contracts, payments and related communication for the local retailers of such products. Our affordable modular and interoperable solution connects energy and payment methods (Pay-as-you-go, mobile money) to a suite of enterprise applications that allows the smooth management of lease financing and field operations, while providing key financial data and metrics to investors.
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