How our activities added value for our stakeholders
Value created for our customers
Customers
for DStv in South Africa
for DStv in the Rest of Africa
for GOtv in the Rest of Africa
| (1) | The CSAT score is an internally defined customer satisfaction measure
based on aggregation of all key points on the customer journey, weighted in terms of importance to customers. |
Our customers are at the core of our business, and customer centricity is embedded in everything that we do at MultiChoice. We are committed to delivering superior brand experiences across every touchpoint in the customer journey and customer satisfaction metrics are embedded in our key performance indicators. We prioritise our customers’ needs and have enabled our dedicated customer experience teams across our business to continuously monitor and act on customer feedback.
We utilise customer feedback to innovate our products and services, to delight our customers and to enhance their engagements with our brands, products and services.
Pricing
Our pricing decisions are based on a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics in each of our markets. We strive to carefully balance pricing and value perception with the reality of our input costs, most notably the cost of content and technology platforms, as well as the influence of fluctuating exchange rates and our ability to cost effectively hedge against exchange rate risk.
We actively manage pricing to ensure competitiveness and value for our customers. In the current year, we have maintained price increases broadly in line with inflation across the bulk of our markets. We passed below-inflation pricing through in specific market segments where our customers are struggling with affordability or in countries with abnormally elevated inflation rates. Our DStv via Streaming services are priced at a discount to our linear offerings to reflect lower customer acquisition and servicing costs.
To add incremental value to our customers, we have implemented contract offers and bundled savings, while dedicated upsell campaigns were launched to encourage subscribers to derive even more value from our video entertainment platforms. These initiatives benefit our customers while improving activity rates and/or revenue mix in our existing subscriber base, independent of price increases.
Content
As Africa’s leading entertainment company, we use the power of content to enrich lives. Our compelling content includes local and international sports, movies, series, documentaries and reality shows.
Starting with sporting content, football’s greatest season came to life on SuperSport this year with MultiChoice holding exclusive rights to broadcast all 64 matches of the 2022 FIFA World Cup live. With multi-language options, an array of support programming and a 24-hour channel for the duration of the event, the 22nd FIFA World Cup was SuperSport’s most ambitious showcase to date.
The rest of the year contained an action-packed line-up of major local and international sporting events. We kept viewers entertained with the Commonwealth Games and World Athletics Championship. We also continued to entrench our sponsorship of the DStv Premiership with a full 360 marketing approach and customer activation at the games, to ensure fans are fully engaged and entertained. Other enthralling football content like the Women’s AFCON, Cosafa Cup, UEFA Women’s Champions League, UEFA Nations League, La Liga, PSL and EPL created an exciting lead up to the FIFA World Cup, as well.
We endeavour to create and secure the rights to phenomenal general entertainment content from all over the world. In addition to our extensive line-up of the best international shows, movies and channels, local content remained a key differentiator for the group as we continued our investment in African-made entertainment with local actors and producers. Local series, movies and reality shows such as Nigeria Idols, Big Brother Naija (BBN), King Buga in Zambia (Zambezi Magic), Accra Medic in Ghana (Akwaaba Magic), Life of Iris in Zambia (Zambezi Magic), Mahinga in Angola (Kwenda Magic), Last Door in Kenya (Maisha Magic East), Clash of the Titans and Real Housewives of Lagos provided endless hours of entertainment across the continent. MultiChoice also extended its selection of local channels which now includes Akwaaba Magic Abusua, Magic Showcase, Mzansi Music and Teen Africa TV, to name a few, which expands our ability to continue show casing authentic African stories and talent from across the continent.
South Africa
We strive to ensure our brand and content offering remains fresh and relevant within every market in which we operate. We rejuvenated our Compact package through the ‘iRep Impilo’ campaign in SA, positioning it as a more digitally savvy offering, using more youthful brand ambassadors. We also kept fans enticed with exciting live events like the DStv Mzansi Viewers Choice Awards (DMVCA’s) which generated remarkable customer engagement and allowed customers to discover more of our world-class content. Fans also came out in numbers for the ever-popular DStv Delicious Festival which was our first major event post the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. We introduced new formats like Saturday Showdown, new telenovelas like Diepe Waters and extended existing titles like Umkhoka. We concluded the year with the popular Big Brother Titans, a combined South African and Nigerian cast which generated extensive interest and viewership.
Rest of Africa
We are continuously finding ways to introduce customers to a world of more entertainment through exposure to a broader range of content on other packages. Our customers experienced open windows across several channels, and access to preview first episodes of new shows, while themed festivals and pop-up channels were made available throughout the year. In line with our mantra to delight, retain and entice our customers with our content, we upped the ante this year by running three campaigns (’Level Up’, ‘Festive Free Upgrade’ and ‘Step Up’) that afforded customers the opportunity to experience our amazing sports offering, movies and entertainment content available on higher tier packages at no additional cost.
We continue to offer new and engaging ways for our customers to interact with us and their favourite shows.
New products and services
Innovation is an integral part of our business as we strive to continuously launch new products and enhanced features to excite and delight our customers.
South Africa
Bolstering our aggregation strategy, we became the official launch partner for Disney+ when they launched in South Africa in May 2022 and provided several innovative options linked to our subscription bundles. We widened our content offering by giving customers access to exclusive Universal+ on demand library programming across several packages, which allowed viewers to binge popular international content such as E!, DreamWorks and Studio Universal all in one convenient place.
The year also saw the launch of the DStv Streama, our stand alone streaming device. This innovative product allows customers to broaden their DStv experience by streaming content from a variety of apps using a single interface, without the need for a satellite dish or installation.
To support our customers in accessing the best streaming content through our platform and to stay connected, we extended our existing DStv fixed LTE offering by partnering with Openserve and Vumatel to launch DStv Fibre (both as a standalone offer and as part of a subscription bundle). The initial uptake of this exciting new product has been encouraging, and we look forward to further enhancing the offering.
We also launched Namola as an add-to-bill product, a compelling personal safety app, which enriches our customers lives by giving them real-time access to emergency and security services wherever they go, as well as the ability to track family members. Our insurance business also saw significant growth, where we introduced further life products into the portfolio and the overall portfolio grew in excess of 500k policies, to close on 2,4m policies.
Our ongoing ambition is to not only provide our customer with a wide range of value experiences, but also reward our most loyal customers. Our DStv Rewards programme doubled in membership and surpassed 1.3m members. The programme rewarded customers for their ongoing loyalty and engagement through multiple campaigns, such as the Engen Fuel Voucher Offer, where we gave away around ZAR40m worth in fuel vouchers to our customers. In addition, we created and executed a myriad of ‘Reconnect’, ‘Upgrade’ and ‘Surprise and Delight’ offers for our customers by fully leveraging our investment in state-of-the-art Salesforce Marketing Automation technology.
Rest of Africa
Following a successful launch in Kenya, DStv via Streaming is now also available in Angola and Zimbabwe. This service provides customers with a more affordable way to subscribe and watch all channels via the DStv app, without the need to purchase a decoder or have a satellite connection.
We continue to offer new and engaging ways for our customers to interact with us and their favourite shows. This year, MultiChoice introduced BBN quizzes and games on the MyDStv and MyGOtv apps, which enabled customers to play and earn votes throughout the season. We also launched a ‘Message to TV’ capability on our apps which allowed customers to send their BBN messages to be viewed on the live feed.
We recently launched an end-to-end gamification strategy on our digital channels across 13 markets. This initiative enhances customer experience through the ability to play engaging games, earn points and stand the chance to win a variety of vouchers and entries into a grand prize draw.
We have made headway in providing our customers with an omni-channel experience. Customers are now able to discover special offers and rewards by calling a dedicated telephone number, exploring the MyDStv or MyGOtv apps or using our USSD service i.e real time communications interface that enables customers to perform self-service using a mobile phone. This significantly enhances their ability to extract even more value for their subscriptions and reduces cost and effort in getting to a physical store.
Customer sales and service
Our customers are at the heart of everything that we do, and we strive to deliver enhanced experiences for them throughout the year. We conducted deeper research to understand how customers prefer engaging with us and to ensure we offer them the appropriate sales and service platform according to their channel of choice. We continued to provide our customers with seamless digital options to discover our content and manage their services, using our website available in 50 countries, mobile apps available in 48 countries or via WhatsApp self-service which is currently available in 13 markets.
South Africa
We are truly passionate about providing our customers with an exceptional sales and service experience. A key component of our South Africa strategy in FY23 was to build out an Outbound Sales and Retention capability. We successfully hired and fully trained additional customer care agents to both drive sales of our products and services, and also to support retention by reminding customers timeously to pay subscriptions, offer them deals and rehabilitative offers, amongst other activities. We constantly strive to offer our customers the best deals and worked with our extensive retail partner network to execute on successful FIFA World Cup and Black Friday promotions. This allowed us to drive significant decoder sales throughout the year, growing our customer base.
Innovation is at the heart of everything we do, and we made huge strides to improve our core technologies. We future-proofed our telephony technology by converting our call centre environments to state-of-the-art Avaya technology. This allows us to do both inbound and outbound calls and provides robust reporting to further enhance our exceptional customer service delivery and truly understand our customer needs.
We also continued to expand our customer service and retail footprint in underserved areas. We rolled out a further 10 DStv Express Containers across the country and further promoted our full customer experience with more interactive kiosks in shopping malls. In addition, we upgraded the Randburg Walk-in Centre to reflect the contemporary look and feel of the DStv brand, introducing new, innovative and convenient features like the Xpress bar where customers can arrange pre-booked service.
In SA, we delivered a CSAT score of 78% in FY23 (FY22:78%), which was in line with our target of 78%.
Rest of Africa
In the Rest of Africa, we continued to expand our digital enablement footprint by enhancing the digital options that customers can use to find content, manage their subscriptions and engage with us.
The 'DStv self-activation' capability provides new customers with the ability to activate their new subscription using a digital platform of their choice, eliminating the need to phone the call centre or wait in queues at the MultiChoice branches to get their decoders activated. This feature is currently available on the app in five countries, through a real-time interactive service (USSD) in six countries, and on Telegram in one country. We plan to expand this service further in the year ahead.
Our '100% Premium' programme continues to surprise and delight our Premium customers through value-added offerings, as well as special privileges such as exclusive travel offers and access to VIP events. Over 6 000 Premium customers from our Rest of Africa business have been rewarded since inception of the programme. We are also constantly finding new ways to reward our loyal customers and have launched 'priority routing' for Premium customers that phone the call centre.
In the Rest of Africa, we achieved CSAT scores of 74% (FY22: 73%) for DStv (against a target of 74%) and 70% (FY22 69%) for GOtv (against a target of 72%).
We serve millions of customers across multiple channels, spanning from traditional to digital offerings. Our extensive customer service footprint includes 21 in-bound call centres, 105 MultiChoice branches and 2 264 customer service representatives along with self-service MyDStv and MyGOtv apps, social media channels, and other digital assisted and self-service options. We have made live chat available on our mobile apps across 47 African markets, strengthening our ability to retain customers via digital platforms. This capability has reduced call centre channel share usage by 6% and increased self-service channel share usage by 10% from FY22 to FY23. A visual interactive voice response (IVR) functionality was launched in Tanzania, which now adds a multichannel, visual interface to the traditional interactive voice response IVR service channel available to customers. Combined, these initiatives drove an average of 12m (FY22: 12m) monthly customer interactions, 79% of which were through digital self-service channels (FY22: 80%).
Our extensive third-party payment network across sub-Saharan Africa was further expanded through integrations with 36 vendors in South Africa and 171 in the Rest of Africa. These vendors include many large retailers, fin-tech operators, mobile network operators and banks, as well as our own digital self-service payment platforms that offer customers a simple and convenient way to pay their subscriptions online. This year, we launched Mastercard as a payment option on our digital channels in several of our African markets. Total revenue collected via our digital channels amounted to ZAR4.9bn across South Africa and Rest of Africa, up 42% YoY.
We serve millions of customers across multiple channels, spanning from traditional to digital offerings.
Our extensive customer service footprint includes 21 in-bound call centres, 105 MultiChoice branches and 2 264 customer service representatives.
B2B customers
DStv Media Sales provides advertising solutions to MultiChoice's corporate customers in our video entertainment business, and we served 935 (FY22: 1 060) clients in FY23. Our MultiChoice linear pay-TV customer base covers over 100m economically active subscribers and their families and we are able to reach and communicate with a broad potential customer base. Our DStv Media Sales business is also active in the digital advertising space and is actively growing its advertising business in our Rest of African markets. Historically the Rest of Africa lacked third-party ratings data to support pricing and selling of ad inventories. We have addressed this issue by leveraging our internal data, popular properties like BBN and our growing portfolio of local channels to pursue the growth opportunity. Our customer insights, coupled with our understanding of our advertising clients' brands and marketing needs, enable us to assist our corporate customers in growing their businesses without impairing our customers' viewing experience.
Aside from protecting the group's content, and that of its suppliers, as well as its platforms and devices, Irdeto provides digital platform cybersecurity services to 382 external customers across 78 (FY21: 77) countries. Irdeto's operations span video entertainment and video gaming, as well as connected industries such as transport. Irdeto is able to leverage its core security and software capabilities to protect content, data and devices in new verticals and is in the process of evaluating connected health with the view to establishing a new promising vertical alongside its existing business lines. We typically have a long-term relationship with our corporate customers and work closely with them as partners to ensure that we provide them with the most appropriate, cutting-edge technology solutions to solve their evolving security needs.
Pricing
Customers typically express a desire for lower prices or lower price increases on packages, especially during difficult economic times when household budgets are stretched.
Affordability
Customers are finding it increasingly difficult to afford their preferred MultiChoice services due to intensifying macro-economic and consumer pressures.
Rising inflation and unemployment across our markets, coupled with specific events like the destructive flooding across west and central Africa, specifically in Nigeria, is hindering our customer's ability to afford their preferred DStv and GOtv subscriptions.
MultiChoice runs special offers throughout the year, particularly on hardware and value-added content, to relieve some of the financial pressures associated with staying connected to our world of entertainment.
We have also introduced new, entry level DStv packages in markets that are struggling, to ensure that customers have the most affordable options available to them.
Repeats
Content is repeated on our linear platform which can erode the customer's perceived experience if done to excess.
Flexible Packages
Customers often express a desire to select their own package of channels (à la carte), or packages based on specific genres, such as a dedicated sport package or movie package.
Limit to concurrent streaming
During FY23, we restricted simultaneous streaming through the DStv app by limiting it to one device at a time. This created frustration in our customer base.
Key focus areas going forward
- In line with the group's strategy, we will continue to focus efforts on expanding our ecosystem by introducing new products and services that meet and exceed customer needs and keep them at the center of everything that we do.
- We will amplify the use of automation and digitization to enhance our end-to-end customer journeys and to ensure exceptional customer experience.
- Local, original, exclusive content remains at the heart of our strategy and we will persist in our investment in our catalogues and the local industry.
- We will look to introduce even more channels for customers to engage with offers, fostering an enhanced omni channel experience.
- The group will increase our investment in building technology-focused businesses to address customers' everyday needs and drive digital optimization across our functional areas, increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies as relevant and appropriate.
- Will further enhance customer privacy and data protection.
- Applying focus and resources to ensure that Showmax becomes the leading African SVOD service.