In the first hundred days in his new role, MTN South Africa’s new CIO, Benjamin Marais says his focus was to simplify information technology processes internally and externally, and beef up security of the systems in order to enhance customer experience.
“It is critical that the IT systems we have in place serve as enablers that help us to provide quality service, and are not cumbersome stumbling blocks that put a damper on customer experience,” says Marais.
“It’s not only about simplicity, but also about giving our customers assurance about the integrity of our systems – this is not only part of good corporate governance, which requires us to continuously tighten our internal controls, but also part of an ongoing quest to provide a superior customer experience.”
Marais provides figures to demonstrate the veracity of MTN’s IT infrastructure.
“As a testament to the robustness of the IT processes, MTN processes approximately 3-billion calls and documents the same volume of data records per day, connects 80-million minutes of calls per day, connects up to 2-million new devices to the network each month, hosts 66 000 unique websites every five minutes and dispensed 890-million voucher orders to logical channel partners orders in the past six months,” says Marais.
He adds: “A lot has been done to capacitate the system and the network to carry increasing traffic, and we are the first to admit that more needs to be done to take customer-centricity to the next level in line with our mission of making our customer’s lives a whole lot brighter.”
