Jumia harnesses AI to transform Africa’s leading online marketplace
The Challenge
As the premier e-commerce, logistics and payments platform in Africa, Jumia serves as a vital marketplace linking thousands of sellers with millions of consumers across the continent.
With integrated logistics and digital payment services, it unlocks opportunities for small businesses to sell online and gives customers the freedom to shop and pay when and where they want.
Upon joining Jumia as Group Vice President of Business Products in June 2022, Hanan El Matarawy embarked on a mission to enhance the user experience (UX) for customers, sellers and employees alike. To ensure the company’s success, she looked for a solution that would help optimize costs while maintaining Jumia’s customer-centric approach. She wanted to consolidate the company’s existing support tools and communication channels onto a single, unified platform. This would enable Jumia to streamline support for its diverse user base across countries and languages. El Matarawy also wanted built-in reporting and analytics capabilities to provide an end-to-end view across all customers, agents, sellers and geographic regions.
El Matarawy looked for a solution that would help Jumia to:
- Enhance communication with customers: Jumia wanted to improve agent efficiency and optimize costs while prioritizing customer experience on social media channels, live chat and email.
- Improve seller support: The solution should also enable comprehensive support services for Jumia’s sellers on channels like live chat, email, claim forms and WhatsApp.
- Support back-office operations: Jumia wanted a technology solution to support JumiaPay and Jumia Ecommerce Prepaid Queries, which handles customer queries related to payments and prepaid services.
The Solution
Jumia selected Sprinklr Service to enhance the user experience for customers, sellers and employees across 11 African countries and 176 digital channels, including WhatsApp, TikTok, email and live chat.
I was looking for a partnership, and that's what we got with Sprinklr. The team customizes the solution based on what our customers really need and contributes to our platform in a way that helps both of us grow.”
Group Vice President of Business Products , Jumia
Sprinklr's customized, AI-powered platform and self-service capabilities offer Jumia a scalable, omnichannel solution to effectively manage support for its diverse user base.
Scaling customer service across channels, regions and languages
El Matarawy’s first order of business was to migrate some 200 customer support agents to Sprinklr before its legacy solution sunsetted. When evaluating options for a new technology solution, El Matarawy prioritized self-service and omnichannel capabilities. She wanted to enable customers to interact with customer service agents on whichever channels they prefer.
“Jumia has a huge spectrum of users across our African markets,” explains El Matarawy. Some customers only reach out through phone calls, she says, while others rely heavily on chat platforms or social media. There are those who prefer human interaction, while others would rather engage with a chatbot.
“Because of these diverse preferences, we needed to unite the different channels on one solution to improve usability for both customers and agents.” With Sprinklr Service, Jumia successfully integrated multiple digital channels, enabling agents to provide seamless support, irrespective of the customer's chosen communication channel. Sprinklr also enables Jumia to support customers in multiple languages, including English, French, Egyptian Arabic and Moroccan Arabic — with plans to roll out additional languages soon. The team is eager to roll out Sprinklr’s real-time translation feature to assist with translating local African languages.
Enhanced visibility for optimal workforce management
Jumia's adoption of Sprinklr consolidates user support operations onto a single platform, providing real-time visibility into agent interactions and performance. This empowers managers to understand key topics and themes that drive contact center traffic and to allocate support resources effectively. With customizable reporting and data-driven insights, the team gains a deeper understanding of support interactions, enabling targeted training programs and enhancing overall service quality.
"Our decision to implement Sprinklr was driven by the need for enhanced visibility, enabling managers to make informed decisions in real time," explains El Matarawy. "Real-time reporting has empowered managers to optimize agent resources instantly."
Supporting users and agents with AI-powered solutions
During peak sales periods like Black Friday or the company’s anniversary sale, Jumia experiences significant spikes in sales and website traffic. To accommodate this surge, the company hires seasonal support agents. With automated scripts and clearly defined processes, Sprinklr’s Guided Workflows capability expedites training and onboarding. It also streamlines the agent experience, allowing them to execute direct actions from one screen. This increases their efficiency by eliminating the need to toggle between browser tabs. AI-powered canned responses provide agents with predefined, templated responses that agents can use to respond quickly to common customer questions. This saves time and ensures consistency in communication, helping agents handle a high volume of inquiries efficiently.
Soon, Jumia’s customer support will be enhanced with an AI-powered chatbot. When users engage with the chatbot, they will receive personalized responses based on their unique needs. The Jumia team can then take information learned in these interactions to tweak and optimize the bot, providing a better self-serve solution for customers.
“This channel will be more accessible and more reliable for our customers,” explains El Matarwy. "It will offer the self-serve experience that has always been our ultimate goal.”
The Outcome
With Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform, Jumia has transformed the way it manages customer support, sellers support, and payment services for Africa’s leading ecommerce retail site.
First, Jumia built an in-house, omnichannel support team for customers, powered by Sprinklr. The unified platform enables faster response times, improved case resolution rates and better customer satisfaction scores. Next, the company migrated the back office for JumiaPay (payment service) customers and payment queries. Finally, it migrated sellers’ support services to the platform.
Between July and October of 2023 — across customer service, payment services and inquiries, and sellers’ support services — 94.46% of Jumia’s first response rates were within its SLA. During that same time period, 43% of all cases were created using the live chat feature, proving the positive impact that offering diverse channels and automated communication has on user experience. The escalation rate dropped more than 11% and the average CSAT score rose to more than 76%.
As Jumia’s CX strategy continues to evolve, the team plans to integrate Sprinklr’s Conversational AI bots into its platform to further enhance its UX and improve self-service capabilities.
“I was looking for a partnership, and that's what we got with Sprinklr,” says El Matarawy. “The team customizes the solution based on what our customers really need and contributes to our platform in a way that helps both of us grow.”