MEET THE STAFF SERIES

Placing Customers on Appropriate Tariff Ensures Revenue Improvement _Mr. Wyume SMS Barnawa

CCD: Mr. Wyume, what has been your experience as a Senior Marketing Supervisor in Barnawa Area Office?

DN: As an SMS, it has been highly educative and quiet challenging. There are two levels of supervision an SMS undertake; I oversee the supervisors and the sales reps. So as an SMS, my primary responsibility is to supervise the Service Centres Supervisors, monitor the cash collection and put in place strategies that will ensure improvement in the collection, make sure that the Company’s established procedures and work processes are adhered to by all staff under your supervision and last, but not the least, ensure that all reports are accurate and submitted to the headquarter within the stipulated time.

CCD: What would you consider as the challenging part of supervising people and managing customers?

DN: The basic challenge is getting the staff to key into the new processes; each task or assignment must be completed within a stipulated time, this is what some of them could not come to term with. The second constraint is that some of the Sales Reps are slow in understanding their responsibilities and the demand of their offices. I don’t know if some of them had the necessary orientation before they were posted to the fields or not, almost everyday, one has to remind them of certain routine demand of the job, work flow etc. There is also the need for more hands in the Unit.

As for the customers, the major challenge is apathy towards payment of bills and some pockets of hostility against the staff.  

CCD: What are your strategies for achieving the Area Office’s target?

DN Ours is a data driven strategy; we believe that the set objective can be archived first by using our data, we started by enumerating all electricity users in our entire area of coverage; our major goal is to see that we actually have a reliable database of our customers and be using it to run our operations. For example, our disconnection schedule shall be pulled out directly from the payment made for last month.

Then PMM monitoring; we reinvigorate our PPM monitoring team to make it more effective, every day they are given list of non-vending customers which they must visit to find out why are those customers not vending. We also establish and maintained good rapport with traditional leaders in rural communities who have been beneficial to us in terms of revenue collection and generation. We have also embarked on extensive tariff re-classification to ensure that our customers are placed on appropriate tariff. In terms of revenue collection, target is cascaded down to each Service Center and sales representative respectively with a stipulated amount expected at the end of every month. So, the way we drive our process is completely data dependent.

CCD: What is the percentage collection in comparison to the billing and the percentage billing when compared to the energy received?

DN: Our billing efficiency used to be below fifty percent (50%) but as from April, we increased our billing efficiency to seventy-eight percent (78%). That means after removing energy consumed by the PPM customers, when we checked our energy on grid, we actually billed our customers 78%. so I can say for billing efficiency we are getting there but for collection much need to be done, because when I resumed duty here as an SMS we were at 23% but as of last month, we recorded 49% on Non-MD customers. we are making progress.

CCD: What would you consider as your major achievement since you assumed duty as SMS in Barnawa?

DN: When you said achievements, I would say at least in term of PPM monitoring we put in place an effective measure to monitor all PPM customers and equally supervise the PPM team. This has helped in reducing cases of bypass and ensures early detection of energy theft.  We’ve also successfully run our own database management for the past four months which to a great extent is up to date.

CCD: How do you manage your subordinate for effective teamwork?

DN: I share my knowledge, all information and best practice with my subordinates. Once you have a common goal, teamwork would be effective, so during our review every month, we discuss our strategies and agree on how to implement the strategies in other to achieve better result. So when we have a common goal we keep driving towards it till we achieve our goal and automatically teamwork comes.

CCD: With your experience as a supervisor, tell us one thing you want the Management to do differently.

DN: In terms of communication in the organization, I strongly advise that we should have a clear channel of communication, we always have issues when we sent information to the headquarters and we don’t get feedback on time. We in the field needs to be responded to immediately whenever we pass something to the higher Management; even if our request are not granted, we should be informed on why it was not effected on time to enable us effect correction and that will go a long way to help us in our operations.

CCD: What are you doing in terms of relationship management with staff and customers as well?

DN: In our area, we tried as much as possible to send out timely information and messages to our customers. Each supervisor and sales reps have public WhatsApp group that they communicate with respective customers. The former BDRO, HajiaYaro introduced customers in cluster where customers in each cluster belongs to a separate WhatsApp group. Then the current BDRO, Mr. Sunday Yahaya also brought up customer consultative forum. Within the space of three months we met with the entire community six times. So, we always engage with the customers to find out what issues they have and we receive feedback from them through such engagements. We also use the Forum to enlighten them on their responsibilities to the Company.