Andrew Kent

I’ve been with Bboxx for nearly a decade. In fact – longer than any other institution, including schools! Why?

Because I can’t imagine much more important or interesting work than what we’re doing every day at Bboxx: transforming lives and unlocking potential through access to energy (and finance, and distribution).

The company is almost unrecognisable from when I started. Back then, there were no shops – we distributed through third parties. There were no payment plans – we sold upfront to these third parties. Even when we started payment plans, there was no SMART Solar or remote switch off – when a client missed payment, we sent someone to remove the fuse from the Control Unit. Even when we opened shops, there was no Bboxx Pulse management platform – we had to send a guy around with a USB drive to download data from an Excel CRM once a week and upload the latest version of the CRM. We’ve come a long way.

My team is responsible for designing how the business operates and translating this into working software: sales, credit management, payment integrations, and last mile logistics. It’s quite cross-functional: we analyse the problems facing our OpCos, design optimal processes and/or new ideas for solving those problems in the most effective and cost-efficient manner, translate those processes into requirements for developers to build working software, and implement these new features across OpCos in a scalable manner.

Sometimes understanding the customer involves analyzing data. And sometimes it means hoeing cassava (badly) to understand their daily lives and dream up better ways of serving them through new products, services, and processes.