 Thank you for staying with us, you're still watching The Breakfast on Plus TV Africa and it's tech Tuesday so today we'll be talking about technology, the prominence of technology among Nigerian businesses today. Now we have our guest here, Kendi Ogundari, he's the country manager for Zoho Technologies. Good morning Kendi, thank you for joining us. Good morning, thank you for having me. Yes, alright so technology has taken over the world and I mean even in 2023 we've seen the rise of AI more than ever before. You can do a lot of things you know just with your mobile phone, you can just put it prompt and you get everything that you need. You can just say please create a picture that does this and that and that and boom there's a full picture being out. So now we're talking about you know using technology for your business. I just want you to give us an overview of how important and how beneficial it is for us to start to use incorporate technology into our businesses and our everyday lives as well because our quarter of the day was from Bill Gates and he talks about technology you know coming into our lives and you don't even really recognize it, you don't know that it's there but then as you have it in your everyday life it's just subtle and it just comes in. So how do we start to use technology for our businesses and our everyday lives and you know it's good for us. Great thank you very much for that. I also believe that's every human being today we are using technology in one way or the other. Even as a business owner small medium enterprise we are using a technology. For example people are using social media to sell their stalls. Social media is a technology platform. Now if you go further down that is when you're not good to optimizing your business processes and you now think of we being cooperating a CRM tool, you try to optimize your marketing activities, you try to do your data analysis and you're checking getting huge data to interpret them then making from decision from then. But from the basic right technologies are there today. It has every country state you know WhatsApp, story messages and everything people are selling in social media using technology on a daily basis but then for you to scale your business you must find a way to utilize this tool properly and get a proper training or orientation on how to expand your business, derive data from these analysis and then you can then scale your businesses. We know that technology is important and what we should be talking about is the type of technology that we need for businesses to thrive. A funny thing is that when we were doing cashless economy as it was there are a lot of people that you go to and you ask them if they have a POS machine and they tell you that their business has not grown to the point that they need a POS and I keep wondering how big will your business be before you get a POS machine and people can't pay you some of them lost customers and all that and you know I don't know if we have enough information out there that will make give the people a different psyche when it comes to embracing technology. Do you think it's something that we can just at a snap of the finger get people to incorporate in their businesses? I think it's possible because I work in that space and also because it's possible but has it been done enough? Yes I think we just need to do is create more awareness for people so for example my organization will focus a little bit more on MSI means to empower them you know which is why we encourage them to use an invoicing software you know. When you do an invoicing software at the end of the day you will be able to see how much debit you have, how much credit you have, who is holding you, when is this overdue and with that you can actually get an holistic view of that. Now if you have an invoicing software which is an accounting software you can easily assess some grants from the government you can go to the bank to scale up your business because you have data sets to show them okay yeah this is how much I make last year now I will need you to give me maybe a certain amount of money to expand my business. Now moving forward to marketing activities right how do you engage your engagement? How do you measure it? So your personal social media you are getting 50 comments, 120 likes. How do you know your reach? How do you know engagement? You know you need a software that will interpret all these things for you then you can make sense. You will know the demographs okay maybe people between the age of 21 and 30 is my appeal point you know so you'll create content that will appeal to them. If you have that data or maybe between 70 and 80 you know okay maybe retirees you'll be able to know the sense of that and then create content that will speak to that demograph. So technology is very important. So it is only available. We just want to create more awareness for them to see it and use it. I think there are some people feel that when we're talking technology you have to be a very manate person. That is a notion that I don't know how we can we can debunk or we can correct. You have to be a nerd because sometimes you when you see people who are into technology people who are tech bulls and Texas like this person is a nerd this person is thinking numbers you know all of that like things my brain cannot assimilate. So is it something that the local women in the markets can also use? Yes I would say that if you can use a WhatsApp message right you can use WhatsApp you can post on Facebook and even like and comment on Facebook you will be able to use any invoicing software any marketing software to scale your business. Just that there is this story around technology being big like you need a huge computer you need to see them. I mean nowadays we are SaaS companies like my company Zoho is a cloud-based software so you can download all the applications you need to run your business on your mobile phone. So you'll love a CRM to your mobile phone. You just need to check what is your CRM. CRM we are talking about. We are talking about what CRM is. CRM is customer relationship management software. Now when you use a customer management software it helps you analyze and also nurture your lead through the sales pipeline. So if you get multiple leads from multiple sources Instagram Facebook or you can go to web firms online. People come to your page. It tells you where your phone is from. I like that. And then automatically the CRM has capability to even go a little bit further by automating your processes. So you can call them or try to send email. You can instruct the AI on the CRM to do a welcome email. That's amazing. Yeah you can do that. For example a lot of us we fill a lot of form online and maybe to reach to someone is not calling. I can't remember. Can you imagine when you submit a form on the website or you try to reach out to a vendor on social media and your CRM too is sending a message. Hello Kenny. How are you? How are you pursuing interest? Automatically that would trigger something in here. You can't engage in the business. You know the really two days later, hey Kenny you have not made any purchase yet. Can we help you visit this? So all of that is automated? Yes. That's amazing. When we get on our birthdays we get this message from our band. Yes. Even emails. I got an email from this system to found activities, actions. So I stopped wrapping for my bank. I got email. I remember my birthday. So we have begun enumerating these tools that we need. Let's just continue and say okay when you call one you see what the benefits of this and how you can use them because we need to know them and identify them. Okay great. So the first one is sales. I believe that for every company there are three major departments, sales, marketing and finance. So for your sales department you need a CRM tool. Whether big or small. So for example we have Zolo CRM, we have Zolo Begin, we have Zolo Table. Now for different categories of clients we can recommend CRM if you need a huge automation done. Or we can recommend Zolo Begin which is a small for small businesses like Moms and Pulse where they just want to know the name of their customer, the address and phone number. Then Table is people that are not really using anything at the moment. We are trying to encourage them to go from spreadsheet to a software that they can easily automate. So to manage your sales process you need a customer agency management tool. You'll be able to nurture your lead through the sales pipeline. You will know what is the status of this on the pipeline. You will know how many people are currently under negotiation. You are bidding, you are trying to go back and forth. All the emails, communication, everything is taught on the CRM. Now if you go to marketing, marketing is very important because these are people that shout. They tell you about your brand. So we need email marketing and I believe that email marketing is very very important because you need to keep constant touch with your people. You need to be in touch with them, you need to send them emails, you need to tell them the new updates, products. So email marketing is there, then we have to show you media marketing. So show you media marketing is very very important. Now you want to be able to know what is going on. And tell your brand story as well. And so I'm going to even ask about success stories. So so far have you seen like success stories with companies you know using AI right now? Do you have success stories that you can actually share with us? Yes a lot of companies are using AI. Like for example I for those CRM tool, AI is heavily incorporated. So and when I say really incorporated, if you're going to come to us and try to tell us about your business, we'll tell you how you can actually use AI to make it easier for you. Now imagine a situation where a customer coming to your company and AI will send automatic email and everything. But then you have 200 customers already coming in on a weekly basis. How do you know which one to focus on? Who is actually interested in your product? You know that means you have to go through one by one coming then sending them email. Yeah I can actually tell you by their engagement with two sectors. What you are selling, what they're interested in, their comments, sentiment analysis. So you give it a top 20, top 5 and top 2. So your sales people will not be chasing it just the cloud. You know they will focus on the main deal and the other people that are interested you can then maybe do that and send the general email to get them to that level whereby you can do it. So AI is very important. Analysts as well too. So data analysis which we have with Power BI, you know when you have a lot of data sets, how do you make sense of it? You know you are getting lead from Abuja Lagos protocols. You are trying to make sense okay which market is more important to me? You know you can actually tell AI to tell you and analyze it okay based on demographic, gender, age and everything then you will be able to make that decision. So AI is everywhere. Yeah but so like people always say or some people say that with AI there's no sense like there's no emotional connection. For instance now I want to be able to connect with my clients, with my customers. Well there is no proper connection because it's just the it's a computer that's you know doing everything for me. A computer generates the people says okay these are the people that come. Computer generates the email that's going. So how do you come you how do you personalize and humanize the AI? Yes humanize the AI. In the sense that with my clients we still have that connection and even other other challenges with AI as well that you'd like to share. Fantastic. So the part of humanizing the AI is where you would need to look for the rights company that provides you the software. Now thinking about business too, how do you feel when I say hi? Are you interested in ZOO CRM, make payment and do this? That is very robotic. But can you imagine when you instruct the AI to say hello Kenny, how's everything going? You know last year you purchased $2,000 worth of this. It's about the same time this year would you like to go for the same thing or these are other recommendations. So you can actually even train the AI to understand your customer's behavior. So it's not just by who? You study your customer behavior and then give recommendation. So that is you personalizing your product and when somebody addresses me asking me directly I'm like okay you know me. You know when people say you can actually train your AI to do that. And when people say AI is taking over our job, you don't know. Are there needs to debunk about AI? Yeah, that's the part of taking over your job. AI is here to enhance and make you work more efficiently. You understand? So for me to set up an AI somebody must input certain things in instruction. Does that need expertise? Technological expertise to do that because a regular person may not know what you're talking about instructing AI. I mean what level of know-how do I have to instruct the AI? I'm sure it's not coding. It's not coding. You guys may be sending a message. It's just like a chat bot. When you open a chat bot like your maybe social media chat bot. You'll see can I see the result for the last two transactions? Send it. AI will go find it. Bring it back to you. It's under the same chat bot. You can just read it. I can remember like other times you have to maybe go to a shelf and start scanning through the files. You can start carrying this name here. No, it's not here. But now with AI you know it's everything is optimized for you. It's been in this report for the last two years. You know it will go run and give you all the reports about caring under the chat bot. So you do need to start coding. I don't like coding. It's very stressful. You know and even at those points there are a lot of platforms that you can even use. Can you imagine with our software you will be able to view the website within 34 hours. It will work in the website and you will publish it and do everything and you can do it by yourself. Drag, drop, drag, drop and everything instead of just publishing it today. Okay, so but how can this start to impact because we're talking about businesses now. We're going to move over to Nigeria in a little bit. How can this start to impact your business? I'm talking about resources. How do you use this AI that we're talking about that we're selling out? I was saying because most times you're saying oh buy this product, this AI whatever would help you. But how am I sure that I would make good sales? How am I sure that it would it would lead to good resources, profitability is what I'm talking about now. Okay, I'm going to itemize like two things. So for example you have 100 customers, right? It is impossible for you to keep track of all the 100 and keep a personal relationship with them. At some point you will be leaving about 20 or 30 of them but with technology and AI you can keep in touch with all of them at the same time at the same space without you getting involved at all. So the deal that you will be able to enhance your business. Now outside that you're going. Yeah, so you can also enhance your business productivity. Like I said for example now you are trying to do the marketing research or something you know and you are trying to launch a new product. You want to see how the market will receive it. What do you do? Pull up the customer data from 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 2 years ago, you see the pattern right? Okay, Nigerians tend to be moving towards technology right now. They're trying to optimize the way they do their business. So with that information you will know which you did go to first. You know, how do you make your money back? Do you know how you make your money back? Can you imagine you're sitting here and your system is working telling 1,000 persons about you and they are coming back? You don't want your sleep. That's the goal. I always tell people I want to be able to make money while I'm waiting. Yes, that's how you just make your money. Yes, and also you can engage all of them. Prospect them, nurture them without you engaging them physically or personally. Computer can do that for you right now. Now imagine you're doing that as one person but imagine you're suffering doing it. You can reach out to multiple persons and you can increase your revenue by doing so. Although you're going to spend more on technology but I think it works. Is what? Yes. Are there potential risks? Oh yes, there are a couple of potential risks. One is data privacy and security because I don't want to expose my data to anybody. You know, recently last year we had Nigerian enacted the law, NDPA, you know and so that is the potential risk which is why when you're looking for a vendor to use for technology you have to consider all these things. The second one will probably be the cost. You know, now technology is very costly. It's quite expensive. It's quite expensive. That is why we on the other side we try to look at the market and present our products in local currency. Most of these big, big names that you have on the market, you pay in USD, you pay in foreign currency. By the time you convert that with the current exchange rate, you've already exhausted your budgets by first quarter or second quarter of the year. You know, so when you're looking at the look at the cost of optimization and don't look just for the big names. Look for who will give you the best or maximum benefit from using the software. So there's no point in using the big brands when the return on investment is just little. We can look for the local one, Indigenous company that will give you the exact same thing you need for your business to grow. Okay, I'm just wondering why we see so much potential in using technology to do our private businesses and the government doesn't seem to be doing anything about it. I don't know. Let's just, people are watching, the people who take decisions for us are watching as well. Let us just know how beneficial it will be not to individuals now because we've seen that a lot to the government. I think our government needs to start incorporating technology in the way they even interact with the common man on the streets. For example, if you want to be a registration in the government office, have you been there? Have you been TDio? Oh yeah, quite TDio. Keep an NIN before you come there and they'll tell you our computer is slow. No, interact. And I'm like, I do need to be here and because I work in that space anytime it's eddy for me to get this thing done. Send me a form online, I can do with my phone, send it back to you, review it and even during the reviewing you can easily set parameters. Okay, if this box is empty, rejects. If that one is not filled, rejects. If value should be here, should be on more than 10 digits. If it's more than 10 digits, reject it. If it's less than 10 digits, reject it. So there are a lot of parameters that you can set. One of that will make life of a normal citizen a lot, lot easier. Even when it comes to governance as well. So I think it's high time for them to start using technology because businesses are growing with technology. Why can't the government grow and develop into that area? Which is why I think the new government is trying something about technology. But I think we need to do more. We need to do more. We need to find a way to incorporate technology in our day-to-day, especially in governance of this country, is very, very important. If we are planning to scale. In your experience with the government and all that, do you think there is that political will to make the atmosphere conducive for technology to thrive? Not just using technology, but for technology, startups like very good for technology to thrive. Or you think there's something that should be done more in policy-wise to make sure? I think in the recent years, I mean, I would say the government, they're always like the last to come. When they follow the trend, they can see that technology is taking over the world. So they are forced to follow it. So now that's why they are trying to make policies to make it easier for people. All these startup policies, startup arts that they are trying to introduce to make it easier for people. But I think the ease of being business in a gas is very important too, because if you are trying to do something in this country, I mean, it's not easy. Going through that level of approval design, it can take years sometimes. Something that you can easily do. But when they incorporate technology, even in how they do it, it makes it easier for people. People can actually sit back, not thinking of the stress they have to go through to get approval. They can think of my business, how I can scale my business. I mean, I know this is so kind of all scaling your business. And I wish we had more time, you know, to dive into this. But sadly, we have to go. But yeah, so we're talking about the prominence of technology among Nigerian businesses today. And our guest has been KND Ogundari, he's the country manager for ZOO technologies. Thank you so much for coming in. And I'm sure we'll bring you back because we need more time. This time was too short. We do need more time. But thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. All right, that's the size of our show. This is where we wrap it up this morning. But we'll be back again tomorrow for the breakfast. My name is Vrimeh Folkman. And my name is Nyamgu Adgarji. Have a very wonderful day. Goodbye.