Commercial head helps drive digital transformation in Namibia

MTC Namibia did not make the most obvious choice when naming Melvin Angula its chief commercial officer (CCO).

An engineer by training with experience of managing technical operations, Angula’s career has included a stint drafting spectrum management regulation for Namibia’s national regulator, which gave him an important lesson in stakeholder management. However, sales, marketing and branding did not feature on his CV.

“People have said you're probably the first chief commercial officer that is a telco guy and has never had a sales job,” says Angula.

“It's not been easy, but the board has been very, very supportive, very open to it, because MTC’s next chapter needed something different – especially now everybody's going digital.”

Fortunately for Angula: “Our revenues have continued to grow since I have been here in this role.” For the financial year ended September 2021, MTC Namibia announced revenues of N$2.799 billion US$0.18), up 4.3% on the previous year and an EBITDA margin of 51.25%.

Angula is keen to use his technology knowledge to build a bridge between customer-facing salespeople and the technical teams developing and supporting products.

“Part of what I want to do is translate what the salespeople need and explain it to engineers,” he says.

In addition to overseeing retail, enterprise, wholesale and international services; all product development; CRM, including call centers; distribution, branding and marketing; he manages strategic partnerships and helps shape and implement MTC Namibia’s digital transformation strategy.

In November 2021, MTC Namibia finished the first phase of its digital transformation, which involved implementing and transferring its operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) infrastructure to the cloud.

Among MTC Namibia’s plans for the new OSS/BSS is the launch of fintech services in the first half of 2022.

In addition to offering customers to digital payment facilities, new financial services will allow MTC Namibia – which operates in one of the world’s least densely populated countries – to reduce the cost of distributing airtime, which many customers today buy in the form of a scratchcard.

“Just think about the amount of money we spend to make sure all 97% of our population has access to our airtime scratchcard,” says Angula. “They aren't able to do it digitally because they don't have a credit or debit card. They don't have any banking services. But if I turn that handset of theirs into a payment method, I don't need to be sending out people to deliver amounts of airtime.”

MTC Namibia is also building up its enterprise services, supported by its ongoing fiber network rollout.

“This is definitely creating change for us in enterprise by [enabling us to] sell our cloud services with a national cloud infrastructure and IoT and fiber and then go fully fledged around value-added services,” explains Angula. In addition, the CSP wants to “become a security enabler of choice”.

“The new OSS/BSS allows us to now be a lot more agile,” says Angula. “Automation means we’ve reduced the time it takes to sign a contract with a customer from one week to about 10 minutes. And product development has gone from say two weeks or three months to three days.” Customer service automation meanwhile has resulted in bots automatically servicing around 7,000 queries a day.

Transforming staff roles

In addition to opening new commercial possibilities, the cloud-based OSS/BSS is transforming how people work.

“The new OSS/BSS has changed job roles so much,” says Angula. “Salespeople used to assist customers’ settings on their phones in shops. Now we have an automated process. So, we have upskilled these sales guys and now they are fiber experts and they are putting in fiber and routers for customers.”

In addition to retraining employees, MTC Namibia is encouraging them to think more broadly about how they use new tools to enhance customer service and provide solutions more quickly.

“Roles will change, with employees no longer performing one specific job,” explains Angula. “We are having to develop a mindset of agility, where staff members start putting themselves in an ‘acting-now’ way of doing business.” At the same time, more rapid access to the right information means people “don’t act blindly, and that's where the aspect of agility and analytics is important; you have the tools with data in front of you as you are making decisions,” says Angula.

With only approximately 585 full-time employees in total to develop, roll out and support all its networks, products, services and customer relationships, MTC Namibia makes a point of hiring people that can be reskilled and redeployed.

“We don't know what our hiring needs will be in five years, so we need to be able to retrain, reskill the people we take on today.”

MTC Namibia’s call center is where many employees first discover the ropes. “All sorts of entry level employees, regardless of their educational background, sort of funnel through the call centers,” explains Angula. “You learn everything about MTC and you get to understand the frustration and demands of customers.”

Interns typically spend six months to a year in call centers, as do graduates with skills in areas such as software development, until an appropriate role becomes available.

One of Angula’s personal measures of success is how well employees can articulate MTC’s goals and services.

“We hold a meeting on the first Friday of every month for every member of staff. We explain to them where we are in the strategy. I do not care whether you are an accountant, a car driver or a salesperson, or whether you work in revenue assurance, if a customer comes to you and says hey, you work for MTC, I saw this article the other day, what does that mean? It you are not able to explain what it means then I'm not doing a good job disseminating that information,” says Angula.