How the unbalanced adoption of technology might be pushing SMEs out of business in emerging markets

Once upon a time in 2018, during my stint with Vconnect, our flagship product offering was to generate leads for small and medium businesses in Nigeria. I was working as a product manager and one of my core responsibilities was to find out what customers really wanted and whether and how much they wanted to user our product to cater to their needs. In line with that, I was seeing a customer who agreed to meet me in a nearby café one afternoon.

She was a masseuse who delivered home service for massage. Her business name was Becky Massage Center (name changed for privacy reason) and her name was Becky (of course). One of the reasons she agreed to see me was she was not happy with our product. To my surprise, when she explained me her problem, I found it was a unique problem for her category of businesses and digital media can quickly solve this problem.

She had subscribed to our lead packages and as expected she started getting calls and messages from people who would inquire for her service. All would have been good only if majority of the calls were not for ‘happy ending massage’ or messages did not read like ‘are you available this night?’ or ‘Is ?? XXX ok for one night?’. The worst part was when she responded to them that she was not selling any sexual services, the callers thought she was negotiating for higher prices and many of them offered her more money.

She wanted to complain why Vconnect was entertaining such people to post inquiries on the businesses’ profiles and asked how we could stop such people at the onset itself. When I explained her how difficult it was to detect such people who diligently fill inquiry form for ‘massage — home service’ but ask for sexual service when they relate to the masseuse. After understanding the problem, after hearing her out for few minutes and after checking her online profile and the first message she sent to her prospects, I suggested her a solution.

Her profile did not show anywhere that she is a professional and certified masseuse, she had registered company with the government, she does not sell any sexual services. Few of her photos were little gaudy and were not well lit which might have attracted a few wrong customers too believing that she is into sexual profession. Also, she could have avoided a lot of useless 2nd or 3rd calls with the wrong leads if her introduction email or message clearly mentioned the scope of her service along with photos/links of her certificate. This ensures that she is nurturing a right lead. Last but not the least, she could list the lewd leads as prospect for her massage too, as those who were ready to pay premium for sex are somehow likely to avail massage service too.

Over the period of following 3 days, I helped her with the implementation of the suggestions in her profile and the intro message. She clearly noticed the difference as the no. of raunchy calls dropped from half a dozen a day during the weekdays and from more than a dozen during the weekends to one or nil and she was able to focus on her business with more bandwidth. She was feeling better about her profession too now

It was a unique problem, but this is a common problem among digitally not so savvy businesses these days. The pace at which the consumers are evolving digitally is way faster than that at which the service providers or the vendors are upgrading themselves. Consumers have started making purchase decisions solely based on online information and if the SMEs are not updating or not providing complete information there, then either they lose the ground or end up nurturing wrong leads just like Becky was doing.

Situation like this might actually attract a few new entrants the same space but without increasing the market size. In this particular example of Becky, the no. of massages delivered would still be same, that means more vendors will be wooing the same no. of customers. The new vendors might steal market share from old ones, and not necessarily because their product/services are giving more value to the end consumers, but probably because they are using the right channel and are passing the right message to the prospective customers. And this might be the cause of about 70% of the SMEs not seeing their 3rd year of operation in the emerging markets like Africa.