WATCH NOW: How to keep customers satisfied during periods of hypergrowth

While hypergrowth may be a problem every entrepreneur dreams of, keeping customers satisfied while a new business is in a rapid period of growth is no easy task.

Just ask Rentoza, a technology and appliances subscription company which is offering customers in South Africa with limited credit access to day-to-day products from smartphones to fridges.

The business is only six years old but has seen phenomenal growth thanks to its innovative rental solution. Luckily for Rentoza, it’s four business-savvy founders had the foresight to integrate a platform to support customer experience from the outset, rather than a frantic implementation in response to a huge peaks in customer queries.

In the second episode of Zendesk’s new Speaker Spotlight vodcast series Rentoza’s Chief Experience Officer, Khosi Ncube, describes how the founders ensured customer satisfaction and loyalty was at an optimal level from the beginning, all while reducing churn.

By using Zendesk from launch, Rentoza was able to customise the solution around the business needs, while integrating the software with third-party platforms and training staff in how to leverage the resulting data from the outset.

“In the beginning the four founders themselves were going on Zendesk, trying to figure out how to do macros and FAQ pages,” she tells Garrett Lawlor, Regional VP of SMB Sales EMEA at Zendesk. “It’s really the foundation of where it started and since then, the business has grown to almost 200 people, half of those being customer facing.”

Ncube describes how due to the complexity of the business in terms of the different stages of the transaction a customer must go through, it was important to build the Zendesk Suite according to the customer journey.

“From starting off with the customer verification process, all the way through, we make sure that customer feedback is received and we are seeing all of it integrated into this omnichannel experience while going into a hypergrowth phase where we moved from 1,000-80,0000 tickets – it’s been a bit scary for us, but we’ve taken it in our stride and it’s assisted us in defining this new customer experience.”

In this 20-minute vodcast episode, Ncube also discusses the importance of futureproofing Rentoza, because, despite being a relatively young business, keeping up with constant change is critical.

“It’s about investing in your data analytics, and your L&D to really ensure that your people are learning as fast as the changes are occurring,” she says. “But it’s also about investing in your R&D so that the business understands what it needs to be doing – you can be sitting here thinking we’re doing things exactly the right way, but we’re actually way behind in terms of industry standards.”

One such recent investment has been in AI, which Ncube says the company must use to anticipate customer needs and take out the mundane tasks, all while reassuring employees that most jobs are not at risk of being taken over by computers.
Meanwhile, the business is also driving personalisation and ensuring there is a customer experience agent at every channel touchpoint, including a move into physical stores and a multitude of social media platforms. It’s necessary to ensure consistency across all these channels so the ability to integrate their data into Zendesk for reporting is critical.

But while Rentoza is all about using the best technology available to improve CX, Ncube insists that “remembering that businesses are built by people” is what will truly drive this company as it continues to growth today and into the future.

To watch the full conversation, click here.