Context & objective

PEG Africa is a scale-up which aims to bring off-grid solar energy access to rural and peri-urban communities in West Africa by providing pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar home systems to remote customers. The company has started its activities in Ghana and managed to expand in Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast over the years. After growing their customer base across the different markets, the PEG team’s objective was to:

Evaluate customer experience and identify pain points
Determine which factors influence loyalty, advocacy (NPS), and repeat purchases

The approach

For this study, the PEG team wanted to reach customers in Ghana, Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast who were mainly in rural/remote areas and had little to no digital literacy. As respondents were unlikely to be able to complete online forms themselves, the most efficient approach was to reach them through phone calls conducted by our local research teams. This method also allowed us to conduct the interviews in local languages like Twi, Wolof or Bambara. The study was conducted as follows:

• Step 1:
  The survey was drafted on the LOOKA platform by the PEG team and in co-creation with the research team. A contact base for containing personal information of each customer, including phone numbers and location, was also shared by the PEG team.
• Step 2:
  Surveyors were recruited based on the language spoken by the respondents in each country. In parallel, we uploaded the contact base on the platform to dispatch the contacts and easily track the progress of completed calls.
• Step 3:
  The telephonic interviews were conducted by our local surveyors, through the LOOKA Dialer app, which allows us to verify that they are reaching out to their assigned numbers. The app helps us track the length of calls, the number of calls attempted and record the interviews.
• Step 4:
  As the surveyors are submitting their interviews, our data manager is checking for coherence of answers and timestamps to validate or discard the submitted responses.

The Result

The PEG team was able to determine their NPS scores and discover areas of improvement such as the servicing and repair of their products after purchase. Furthermore some slight differences between markets have been observed (to be expected) and a clear opportunity to increase repeat purchases and referrals.