Background and Introduction‍

Safaricom is Kenya’s leading telecommunications company. The firm delivers a range of solutions touching on voice, data, home internet, financial services and agribusiness. Until 2017, Safaricom had primarily relied on external agencies and partners to provide digital tracking and social listening for the $10 billion company.

By definition, digital tracking is a broad term used to explain the diverse needs of stakeholders within the Safaricom ecosystem. Previously, stakeholders would write briefs and engage third-party firms to analyse and deliver reports on various research questions.

About Crimson Hexagon (now Brandwatch)

Crimson Hexagon is a leading social listening platform that merged with rival Brandwatch in November of 2018. The result of this is Brandwatch Consumer Research. A robust and competitive platform to answer market research questions at scale.

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The four critical areas of the platform are:

1. HelioSight - a search engine for quick insights, keywords and reporting. This, coupled with a detailed review of digital metrics, forms the basis for snapshot reports.
2. ForSight - by creating a specific research query (also known as a monitor) customer sentiment can be analysed deeply. Crimson Hexagon goes deeper than just positive, negative and neutral sentiments. It allows for the selection of a small percentage of online updates and custom categorisation to explain five different types of positive sentiment, for example.
3. Dashboards - when there’s a need for real-time insights and data, Nendo creates dashboards to answer critical questions for stakeholders. If at a breakfast event or an essential product launch, the volume of engagement, key influencer, talking points in a word cloud and other real-time visuals are custom-built into a dashboard and shared with stakeholders.
4. Alerts - Using a set of rules, Crimson Hexagon can alert a range of stakeholders when specific criteria are met. For example, Nendo has created rules such as when complaints about Safaricom’s network reach 10% above the daily average, an alert featuring a sample of the complaints to specific stakeholders. These alerts apply across financial services (M-PESA, M-Shari, FULIZA) and other products and services.

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Nendo’s Role at Safaricom PLC

In 2018 and 2019, Safaricom PLC engaged Nendo as its Digital Tracking agency. This role sees Nendo serve the telecoms firm in two core ways.

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Sourcing and Securing a Social Listening License for Safaricom PLC

Nendo formed a partnership with leading global social listening platform Brandwatch (which merged with Crimson Hexagon in November 2018). Crimson Hexagon was the preferred platform of choice for Safaricom. Nendo, as a regional partner, secured a 2-year license of the tool and provided this to Safaricom PLC.

This remit includes providing support to over 50 champions of Crimson Hexagon within different departments in the business. Nendo has provided training, ongoing support and customer success services to them.

Nendo’s role was to devolve the ability to generate insights from one department briefing a third-party agency, to creating internal champions capable of serving their business units, departments and teams. Since Nendo began, it has held over ten training sessions with over 100 staff across Safaricom’s major offices.

Nendo secured a license with unlimited users to ensure that all members of staff who want view-only access or are prepared to be trained for editing and full access are capable of self-serving on Crimson Hexagon. They can seek support from Nendo directly, or through the Crimson Hexagon champion closest to them.

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Delivering Digital-led Research and Insights to Safaricom Staff & Senior Leaders

In addition to providing the Crimson Hexagon software license to the business, Nendo is retained as Digital Tracking Agency to deliver specialised services for leadership and teams within Safaricom’s business. These reports, created using Safaricom’s business template, are presented and utilised across senior leadership, management and staff levels for decision making.

Nendo provides the following range of reports: