Meet The Staff Series

A Good SR Must Have Daily Target, be Diplomatic 

With Customers - Jamil Yusuf  
CCD:  Can you briefly tell us a bit about yourself?

JSY: My name is Jamil Suleiman Yusuf, I am a Sales Representative at Kakuri Service Center under Makera Area Office. I studied Banking and Finance at Abubakar Tafawa University, Bauchi. I joined the service of Kaduna Electric September 2015.

CCD: As a Sales Representative what exactly do you do?

JSY: One of the major activity we do is cash collections, we ensure our customers pay their bills promptly and follow up the defaulters. We engages in personal marketing once, twice and thrice; we then follow up for disconnection. We also do enumeration to know our customers and capture new ones, we also ensure they are billed appropriately.  

CCD: How do you go about assignment to ensure you meet your target?    

JSY: To meet my target, I have a strategy of personal marketing, i.e. Meeting the customers one on one to discuss how they are going to make their payment base on their consumption.  I always look at my monthly target, then divide it by the number of working days in the month, that will be my daily benchmark. With this, my concern shall always be to meet or even surpass my daily target. 

CCD: Is there any challenges you encounter in discharging your duty?

JSY: Yes, we face a lot of challenges, energy theft; we have a lot that are involve in such act, but what we normally do is to disconnect them but when it get out of hand, we  talk to the feeder Manager. We also have those that no matter what you do, they won’t pay. Here in Kakuri Service Centre our challenges are limited. We resolve the energy theft by disconnecting.

CCD: In a place where by you have a customer who consume your energy and is not willing to pay, how do you handle such customers?

JSY: In such situation, after the disconnection, we talk to them; give them reasons why they should be paying their bills; we let them know the effect of perpetual default on the value chain; how the energy we supply to them is generated, transmitted and ultimately distributed and how we as a Company need to pay for energy supplied to us. We let them see the reason why they should pay, we

approach them

Nicely, a lot of people do reason with nice approach, because when both parties are hot, it won’t solve the problem. If they are hot, we talk to them calmly, but if they insist on not paying, we go ahead and disconnect. So, it is combination of diplomacy and some reasonable force.

CCD: Every marketer has his/her achievement, what do you consider as you major achievement?

JSY: My major achievement is detecting energy theft in my own area. There was a time I went to a house, I actually discovered they were on prepaid meter and where giving the hole area water for free, I immediately checked the app and I discovered that they only vends 2-3 thousand naira monthly, I called the attention of the engineers to check the meter and discovered it was by passed. They paid for loss of revenue, and meter penalty.

CCD: What was the total customer population in your cluster when you came on board?

JSY: It was two hundred and eighty three for my cluster and is now around three hundred. In terms of collection, it has never dropped down.

CCD: What suggestion do you have to Management or Staff?

JSY: For the Management, I feel they should increase our welfare and they should understand we do face challenges; we need assistance from them like when it comes to extreme energy theft, we need their hands in assisting us. To my colleagues, we should keep working hard, the sky is our limit.