Customer rewards are key to building sustainable businesses – Ononobi

SIMEON ONONOBI is a Co-Founder and CEO at ThankUCash, one of Africa’s leading loyalty and rewards companies. In this interview with IFEOMA OKEKE-KORIEOCHA, he speaks on his company’s recent partnership with Wakanow and how the company uses its tools to help SMEs succeed while increasing consumer buying power and opportunities.

What informed the decision to develop the ThankUCash platform?

When we first started, our business was focused on how we can help businesses grow. I had a previous start-up. I realised that we were going very fast but people weren’t loyal to merchants. I realised that merchants were dying. We were seeing statistics that were really alarming.

Eight out of ten businesses after six months were going down. We thought if these merchants have 100 customers they know, they should be able to sustain these customers and be okay but because there is no data on these customers, it was difficult to follow up.

We are training people and teaching businesses what it is to say ‘Thank you’ to customers

There were no measures in place to sell things to make these customers happier. We realised that there was a big space to fill. So, we started thinking to ourselves what would make customers really happy? It would be if someone said ‘Thank you’ to them and this ‘Thank you’ meant cash.

So, we thought of building something that will allow people to say ‘Thank you’ as a form of cash to customers and make it meaningful to customers.

When we built it, we said for instance; if you are going to buy drugs in a Pharmacy, these drugs can earn you N100. N100 may seem meaningless but what if that same day you went to the Saloon and you got an extra N100 for doing business with that saloon? That same day, you made an extra N500 watching a movie and an extra N100 in a restaurant for dinner.

After the day’s activities, you realised that you have earned about N2,000 that could be used to get something else. This would make an average customer happy.

So, we realised that we need to create an experience around the customer. That is why we say our mission is simple: Create tools that will help SMEs grow but in turn create opportunities for customers to grow as well.

You started a partnership with Wakanow, showing your interest in the travel sector. Are there plans to partner with other companies in the travel sector going forward?

What we have done in ThankUCash is straightforward. We have built a company based on partnerships. We don’t want to start re-inventing the wheel. We don’t want to start going into travel, hospitality, or every other space.

I just want to help the companies in these spaces to achieve the maximum they can achieve. So, for us, partnership is more around what we can do for a company or in a sector.

For us, travel is coming late. We have done almost every other sector. We have done hospitality. We have a lot of hotels that we have helped. We have had some partnerships with Bolt in the past. We have done it with Gas stations. At some point, we had over 100 gas stations where we people could earn points and use those points across the network.

We started a partnership with Wakanow and we will partner with other people. Our system is open for everyone to use to achieve the maximum they can achieve.

So, we are not stopping at one partnership. We are going to partner with banks, super markets, eateries, restaurants, travel, amongst others. For us, it is the value we can give to the businesses to make sure they are sustainable and giving back to their customers.

What does your partnership with Wakanow entail?

Wakanow came to us and said they want to say thank you to their customers and they want to say it in a way that makes sense. So, we told them they can leverage on what we avail and we can integrate into them so we can achieve this. We do analytics and a lot of things in the back-end for them, so they know who their customers are and when they are buying, and the airlines the customers are buying.

We give them this data and they can pre-emptively understand their customers more. They could send you a reminder on your birthday or gifts on certain days. They know when customers fly and when to offer them deals. So, we are the loyalty infrastructure of Wakapoint.

Could you explain what Wakapoint is about?

Wakapoint is Wakanow’s form of loyalty point. This Loyalty point is earned when you do anything on Wakanow. Whether you buy travel, hospitality or whatever it is that Wakanow is doing and you buy, you earn Wakapoints and these Wakapoints can be used for anything on Wakanow’s platform.

How does ‘ThankUCash’ create solutions that help SMEs succeed at the same time increase consumer buying power and opportunities?

I will give you a simple instance to explain this. When I walk into a store for instance and realise they get 300 customers in one week and they are looking at how they can grow from 300 to 1,000 customers. And I look at a cinema house and they have about 1,000 customers every weekend.

So the question is how do I get 1,000 people to realise that there is a supermarket just by the cinema house and how do I get these super market customers to know there is a cinema house close by? In turn, it means both companies now have 1,300 customers.

This is what we are trying to do; to create a community for businesses and make people know that as they are buying things in a supermarket, they can earn points there and use those points in the cinema. This way, we create an opportunity for them to grow. We create tools for them.

We have even gone further to say; How can I make sure that a customer that walks into your store must buy a product? ThankUCash has these solutions. You can walk into an electronic store, ThankUCash looks at how to make it easy for people to pay by instalments and still have money from their salaries to live a comfortable life.

We want to make sure customers come; we create a customer community so that they can keep buying from these merchants loyally at the same time give value and make life easier for the customers.

Read also: Nigeria banks show resilience despite fintech threat

Since ‘ThankUCash’ was founded in 2018, how has the acceptability been in Nigeria, where a new idea such as this is being introduced?

When we first started, it was scary but when a conductor or driver of a bus starts calling you and asking ‘Where are my points?’ then you know people have started accepting this. At some point, we were having 80,000 daily customers and for us, we felt this is really big. We believe if we make this as simple as possible to the consumers, then they will understand what it is.

If a bus driver knows that if he goes into a filling station and he buys 30litres of fuel, he will get one litre free, he will always come back. That way, you don’t have to tell him he is winning points. He just knows he is getting something in return. The simplicity of having conversations with people helps the situation. Right now, we are integrating with banks, tech companies and different players in the space.

Right now, I think we are oversubscribed in terms of the kind of partnerships that people want us to do with them. We have a lot of fintechs that want to use our platform to enjoy that growth that they need. So, yes, acceptability has become very key for us.

What are your major challenges operating in Nigeria?

I try to drill it down to about two challenges. Staffing is a problem. Getting the right people to work with you and to be able to understand this is really a problem. I don’t blame them or even the Nigerian workforce because that is what they have been taught; to follow a particular system.

But being street-wise is different from working in a company. So, I see that as one of the major things. We need to figure out initiatives of helping staff understand their place in a company. It is no longer what you study but common sense. The second one is the Nigerian factor.

I don’t think the Nigerian government is helping us. We are creating employment and paying salaries but we don’t get incentives like the foreign companies get. You have to pay a lot of taxes, yet we create jobs. If the government can help us by figuring out a way to protect start-up founders or start-ups as a whole; this will help us a lot.

Consumer habits in Nigeria are totally different from habits in other countries. How do these peculiarities affect your business?

This affects us. It is like a new category. We are trying to teach people that they need to say ‘Thank you.’ When they say ‘Thank You,’ people will always come back. It is a cultural thing. We know how to say thank you and we train our kids to say thank you.

This is a cultural thing but the hustle is so much that people even forget to appreciate each other. We are trying to bring back this culture. We are only bringing technology to foster this behaviour. We are training people and teaching businesses what it is to say ‘Thank you’ to customers.

If you have a margin of 10 percent, just give one percent back to the customers and let the customers be excited that you think about them. Once this starts happening, companies will start growing.