Kenya Power customers queue to settle bills at Electricity House in Nairobi. PHOTO | FILE
Kenya Power
will from next July introduce a surcharge on bills settled at its
offices in an effort to decongest the banking halls further in a plan
that will also see the listed firm recruit more agents, starting with
200 in Nairobi.
The electricity distributor says the
recruitment will cover the whole country but rolled out in phases as
part of a strategy to drive its growing number of customers to
alternative payment channels such as mobile money.
Managing
director Ben Chumo said its customer base has more than doubled to 5.3
million in the last three years, straining the 825 employees who work at
the firm’s 10 banking halls across the country.
About
630,000 Kenya Power customers paid their bills at the company’s offices
as of June 2016, but Dr Chumo says these halls should be reserved for
services such as enlisting new users and offering support.
“The
idea is to reduce the people coming to our counters by introducing a
fee for those customers who are simply making bill payments,” he told
the Business Daily in a telephone interview last Friday.
“This
is the approach commercial banks have taken to decongest their banking
halls. We shall recruit agents to receive these payments and offer other
services for a small commission. We shall start with 200 agents in
Nairobi in July 2017.”
Six out of every 10 Kenya Power
customers pay their bills via mobile cash platforms such as M-Pesa and
Airtel Money, according to official data available for the year to June.
Supermarkets and retail token vendors are ranked second, taking up 20 per cent of the total payments.
About
13 per cent of Kenya Power’s customers pay their bills at its offices
while seven per cent of them do so at commercial banks.
In
Nairobi, Kenya Power’s main banking halls are Stima Plaza in Ngara and
Electricity House on Harambee Avenue. The State-owned utility also has
offices in Eldoret, Nakuru, Nyeri and Mombasa and other major towns.
Kenya
Power, in its five-year strategic plan starting 2016, disclosed plans
to set up self-service kiosks that would dispense electricity tokens to
customers at malls and retail stores even as it steps up the
installation of prepaid meters.
Of its 5.3 million customers, 3.1 million of them are prepaid customers while the rest still receive monthly bills.
The
power distributor is also exploring other ways of selling pre-paid
electricity besides using mobile money platforms, including using text
messages “without cost”.
“We do not have [the] luxury
of increasing tariffs in order to hire more personnel to serve our
growing number of customers and build bigger banking halls to
accommodate them,” said Dr Chumo.
“We therefore want to
decentralise our services so that we have the least contact with
customers. When you come to the banking hall, it should be for other key
services and not simply paying bills.
No comments :
Post a Comment