Since the beginning of this year, Safaricom has embarked on opening up regional offices. These offices are meant to act as hubs and are located in strategic areas of the country with the view of bringing the telcos services closer to the people.
They include the Nairobi East regional office situated at the Sameer Business Park. This office acts as a hub for the wider Machakos, Kitui and Makueni counties as well as the nearby Kajiado county and neighbouring parts of Nairobi. The Mt.Kenya and North Eastern headquarters situated in Nyeri, this office is expected to serve customers across 17 counties including Embu, Meru, Isiolo, Samburu, Tharaka Nithi, Garissa among others. Others regional offices include the Rift Valley hub located in Nakuru, the Coast hub located in Mombasa, the Nyanza hub and the Nairobi West hub.
To complement the various regional hubs, Safaricom has opened 45 shops across the 6 regions. Nairobi has 20 shops, North Eastern and Mt. Kenya have 7 shops, Coast, Rift Valley and the Nyanza region each have 6 shops. In addition to the shops Safaricom has customer care desks which handle all customer related issues. These customer care desks are spread out in the six regions with those having high populations getting more shops to ensure ease of accessibility.
Unlike in the past one when one had to travel all the way to Nairobi in order to be sorted on some things, say registering for a postpaid service. The regional hubs and customer care desks have brought the telco’s services closer to the people. This eliminates the need for people to travel long distances which would have led to incur costs on transport and maybe accommodation not to mention time lost.
On the telcos side, the regional offices help them to be able to better understand the people’s needs and how to best handle them. This not only helps the telco come up with region specific solutions but also the turnaround time. In the long run, this will not only help the telco to enhance their relationships with the customers but also transform lives.