CCD: Give us a brief profile of who Mohammed Abdulrasheed is.
MA: I joined Kaduna Electric on 1st September 2015 as a Sales Rep in Rigasa Regional Office. Thereafter, I was redeployed to Hayin Rigasa as acting Service Centre Manager. My elevation was based on Performance Appraisal by the Management which was good. I was later posted to Kinkinau. Now I am a Manager at Leventis Service Centre.
CCD: Since you became a Manager, what have you done differently?
MA: When I took over, we had a customer population of 4,000 and an average collection of two to three million naira monthly.
After three months, there was an increase in monthly collection because I had to re-strategize.
I started with the team I was going to work with, carrying everybody along by leveraging on the strength of our human capital to concentrate on the customers.
We make the customers to understand that it is no longer government run but private sector driven. This message has formed a major part of our customer engagement.
On the issue of energy theft, we encourage them on the need to protect our installations.
We equally started capturing customer data in order to update our customer base, which has now increased to 6,500 with a collection of N9m. It was this feat that prompted the then BDRO Ibrahim Mohammed to redeploy me to Kinkinau.
In Kinkinau too, the environment is a little bit better with heavy energy users. Also there had been series of customer enlightenment before I came here.
And I did the same thing by carrying everybody along while carrying corrections here necessary. I built a relationship between the Technical and Commercial teams because when they work as team, we achieve more.
Kinkinau's collection was N6m and now we are close to N13m. I believe the success of the business lies in understanding the business and what customers want and how to get the best out of the customer. All this we can achieve through continuous customer engagement.
CCD: As the person in charge of the Service Centre what is your primary responsibility?
MA: My primary responsibility is to drive the business. As a Service Centre Manager, you oversee the activities of the Service Centre consisting of three units namely: Technical, Commercial and Account.
As a Manager, I have to ensure that every unit performs its duties accordingly. For the Technical people I must ensure that they respond to complaints quickly to reduce downtime; for Sales Reps, I have to ensure that they concentrate on cash drive on daily basis. We review our daily achievements vis-a-vis our daily target.
CCD:Any challenges so far?
MA: There are always challenges in any business but I believe in challenging your challenges; those you think you can manage at your own level, you manage, those you cannot manage, you escalate to the Regional Office.
CCD: As a Service Centre Manager most of your duties involve managing people. How do you cope with it?
MA: Well, being a former bank staff and a Marketing Officer I can say I have enough experience in customer relationship. You need to understand what the customers' grievances are, what they want before you can deduce how to go about it.
You need to sharpen your skill to have good customer relationship skills to enable you manage a customer.
CCD: Meeting target is one of the challenges facing the company. How are you able to boost your collections?
MA: Sometimes you look at target and say, oh, this is too big to achieve. But the key thing is to have a strategy. If you are doing One Thousand today you should challenge yourself to do Ten Thousand
Other major challenges that we face are: energy theft, technical losses, commercial loss, meter bypass, which is why we need proper monitoring, customer engagement and getting people dedicated to their duties. There is no doubt that loyalty and team work will help make the target realizable.
CCD: Any appeal or suggestion to Staff and Management?
MA: My appeal to staff is to remain dedicated, diligent and focused. Hard work propels one to greatness.
The management needs to replace faulty meters with new ones to reduce our collection losses from Prepaid customers.
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