Industry visibility

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Despite the breadth of digital solutions available in the market, LMDs often struggle to easily find solutions that match their needs, while DSPs face difficulties in sharing and marketing their product capabilities. Furthermore, a lot can still be lost in translation, with LMDs struggling both to understand the technical terminology used by DSPs and to define what they are really looking for. DSP’s that contributed to the research, like Upya Technologies, which is one of the innovators supported by the Energy Catalyst programme, provide guidance to LMDs trying to make such decisions. But more tools are needed, including common markets and repositories, and specialised brokering advisories.

To help address this need, the Global Distributors Collective recently launched a digital services catalogue that features more than 70 digital solutions – used and reviewed by their LMD members. This catalogue helps last-mile distributors identify service providers that could help increase business efficiencies and ensure sales agent compliance.



Digital readiness
The intensive on-the-ground requirements to run an LMD france whatsapp number data company mean that other aspects of the business are often left underdeveloped, such as information technology (IT) skills. The lack of basic IT capabilities among LMDs’ employees represents a huge obstacle for DSPs during their onboarding process. Equally important is assessing the digital literacy not only of LMDs’ customer base, but also of the sales agents that will be distributing the solution.

DSPs are innovating here to support the digitalisation of the entire LMD value chain. For instance, Upya Technologies’ “Wingu” app is designed to give LMDs the opportunity to access customer account information, while providing in-app upselling and referrals that enable distributors to increase their sales while reducing their operational costs.



Financing digital transformation
As a rule of thumb, enable|digital, a digital solutions advisory company in frontier markets, tells its clients to budget 7% of their expenses for IT needs, aligned with the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector’s average. However, a PaygOps survey carried out with 40 LMDs showed that 75% of respondents were already underspending on IT – and digital transformation can be a significant additional IT expense. Thus, maximising the value of each IT investment is crucial to closing the affordability gap that many LMDs face. It’s also important to increase LMDs’ awareness of the realistic costs of digitalisation, to help them make accurate financial assessments (e.g., through the use of pricing simulators).