GENERAL REPORT OF THE SEMINAR ON " CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENT TECHNIQUES WITHIN THE WATER AND SANITATION COMPANIES IN AFRICA "

COTONOU, May 15, 16 and 17 2006

GENERAL REPORT

The African Water Association seminar on " Customer management improvement techniques within the water and sanitation companies in Africa ", organized in partnership with SONEB took place in Cotonou’s hotel Croix du Sud from May 15 to 17 2006, and gathered 23 participants from 9 African countries.

Three addresses were made during the opening ceremony which was presided by the Minister of Mines, Energy and Water.

As the first to make an address, Mr Sylvain USHER, President of the AfWA firstly made a presentation of the African Water Association through its various corporate structures before reminding the audience of the many initiatives taken by his Association in order to gather and promote the African water suppliers. He also expressed the gratitude of his Association to the BENIN state and SONEB for sheltering the seminar, a commitment that will favour the growth and influence of the AfWA in our country, host of the AfWA 14 th congress on February 2005.

In his address Mr BABA Moussa, the Managing Director of SONEB, put the emphasis on the topic of the seminar. In fact, as he said, customer management remains the major concern for all the water supply companies since the best indicator for the water quality service is the customer satisfaction and well-being. He then expressed his hope that the conclusions of this seminar could entirely meet the expectations of the customers in the days to come.

The satisfaction of the populations basic needs, especially drinking water supply and sanitation, remains the major issues in the beginning of this third (3 rd) millennium, reminded the Minister in his opening address to the participants.

He also urged the participants in the seminar to integrate in their daily management technical quality services and some management austerity throughout the taking into account of customers’ worries and lending a sympathetic ear to them.

The first module related to the commercial management in Africa was submitted by Mr GUIDIBI Emmanuel Mba, Managing Director of Cabinet Afrique Conseil. The lecturer developed several topics on this very first day, and the following lessons learnt can be pointed out:

1 – Water and Sanitation companies environment in Africa

Right from the start, the lecturer collected the expectations of the participants in the seminar. Five main points resumed the thirty three (33) expectations as follows :

These points were reviewed through a question of general knowledge exercise.

Three main points can be pointed out, i.e :

The following sentence can sum up these three points : "The vision of the enterprise should favour customer counselling and quality service".

With "customer counselling", the customer becomes the major concern of the firm, i.e the priority, the aim. As a consequence, the customer should be considered as an asset for the enterprise.

Thus, the new pyramid of the firm is as follows :

2. Quality in the Water and Sanitation marketing service

The lecturer reviewed several definitions of the quality notion, among which "quality represents a customer’s satisfaction for consuming goods or services". These definitions raised the question as to know what do the water and sanitation companies do when they cannot satisfy customer’s demands ? Partnerships, sub-contracting, creativity could be a solution.

3. Causes of non-quality within the water and sanitation companies

in Africa

The causes of non-quality within the water and sanitation companies in Africa derive on the one hand from the lack of identification of the customer’s true needs owing to a certain weakness as regards prospection and market study, and from the identification of the customer’s potential concerns on the other hand. In order to assess the level of satisfaction, the "FAIRE" model (Reliability, Reception, Reactivity Image, and Empathy) was presented as a tool.

Therefore, "the tree of problems" can permit us to identify the customer’s potential concerns for a better management of the customer relation through the following process :

4. Management role in the improvement of the quality service

At this level, the management staff should be leading all the operations carried out by the firm, to wit :

The works of this first day came to an end with a film dealing with quality service, by Mr RAVELEAU Gilbert a "quality approach" specialist.

Note that quality service is the joining element between service, relation and culture and calls on a certain organization and behaviour.

Quality service is made of the following values :

The non satisfaction of the customer is assessed through the difference between the customer’s expressed needs and the quality service he received.

In order to have a good quality service, the approach to be taken consists in making a diagnosis of incoherencies between the various stages mentioned below:

Firm organization and functioning

The sitting up of such a quality service improvement plan (PAQ) requires the following values :

As to knowing whether our various companies can meed these values, each one of them could identify itself as an enterprise or public administration in the comparative table below.

As a conclusion, we notice that most water supply and sanitation companies are managed like a civil service organization and their agents behave just like civil servants.

After a summary of the first day of the seminar, the lecturer on the second day dealt with the topic related to customer relation management (CRM).

The participants were asked to think over the three (3) questions below in order to facilitate their understanding of this notion :

3. How to build up good relationships with the customers ?

Two approaches of the customer relation management came out of this exercise, i.e "one to one" marketing and "total customer management".

The " one to one" marketing represents the selling and communication means that permit to apply to each customer individually and specifically by considering his own particularities.

In other words, it is the "individualized marketing" as opposed to the "mass marketing".

Consequently, the water and sanitation companies should draw their inspiration from that for a better customer relation management in order to preserve their customer asset.

The identification of customers whose "one to one" approach permits a quality service improvement is favoured by the use of the PARETO law

(20% - 80%)

PARETO LAW

Throughout this notion, a particular emphasis should be put on the customer profitability. In fact, the importance of a customer can be assessed through the revenues generated by him in time. The customer asset is a junction to be maximized in the customer relation management ; and this should push the water and sanitation agents to develop the recommended

"professional kindness"deriving from the three (3) people rule, to wit

"the intelligent people are always nice".

In order to have a successful commercial management policy of the water and sanitation companies in Africa, and considering the various topics that have been developed, it becomes necessary to work out an action plan for the improvement of the customer management (APICM).

This plan should be made of four (4) main points :

To end module 1, a good practices sharing and compilation exercise related to quality service and customer management within our companies gave the following result :

Each participant in the seminar should be able to draw his inspiration from that compilation in order to improve the customer commercial management.

Mr MEVEL, Chairman and Managing Director of INCOM company in France, lectured on the analysis of computer applications in business management in module 2. INCOM company is specialized in the water management and the development of innovating computer materials related to the management of water and sanitation companies.

The following topics were debated on :

Based on a batch-processing, ANEMONE is a software used for the daily management of subscribers and future customers in the field of water and sanitation. The applications are :

" customer account " and " subscriber account ".

The following aspects were debated on :

- Presentation of the DIALOG tool

It is a supplementary software to ANEMONE that permits the management of any kind of demands and claims within the "one to one" customer management approach.

Settlement disputes, claims on bills and water quality, demand for works (production of cost estimates and bills), parcels service agenda, office automation series (word, excel...) can therefore be automatically treated in order to provide each customer with an individual response.

Time management through presence, activity and missing parametering periods, the agenda organization per commercial and administrative technical function or per agent, the updating in real time of a collaborative common agenda were debated on during the second day of the seminar.

The development of this topic made it possible to understand the project management in a continued dialogue culture between both PROFESSIONAL and COMPUTER aspects.

What follows was pointed out by the lecturer :

The closing ceremony was presided by SONEB Managing Director. The floor was firstly given to the recorder of the seminar who made a presentation of the various topics developed as well as the new knowledge acquired for the implementation of the actions in order to better customer management.

The General Secretary of the AfWA was very grateful to some people for the success of this seminar and he congratulated the participants who did not spare any effort to adhere to the pre-established training planning.

In his final address, SONEB Managing Director pointed out the main lessons learnt during this seminar and called on the participants to implement the new knowledge for the benefit of customer management.

While asking the participants to send his sincere greetings to their respective Managing Directors, the General Manager invited all of them to the Association 14 th Congress that will be organized by his company on February 2008 in Cotonou.

Cotonou, May 17 2003