by Achadu Gabriel, Kaduna
The rapid adoption of digital tools by Nigerian businesses and organisations is creating a new challenge, with customer and organisational data increasingly scattered across spreadsheets, online forms, WhatsApp, email platforms and other disconnected systems.
The founders of Huboly, a Nigerian digital platform, Seth Samuel and Obaro Ikoh, said the growing fragmentation of organisational data was making it difficult for many small and medium-sized organisations to maintain accurate records, track customer interactions and sustain relationships with clients, members and beneficiaries.
They said this during discussions on the development of Huboly, which is currently in its public beta phase and is designed to help organisations manage contacts, communications and relationship-related activities from a more connected platform.
Samuel said the problem became apparent as organisations gradually adopted different digital tools to solve individual operational challenges.
He said, “A spreadsheet was created to keep customer records. Someone introduced a Google Form for registrations. WhatsApp became the easiest way to communicate. Another platform was added for email campaigns, while SMS was handled separately. Each tool solved a problem. But together, they sometimes created another one.”
According to him, many organisations now have information about the same customers, members or beneficiaries stored in different locations, making it difficult for staff to establish which record is current or determine the history of interactions.
He said, “The challenge is not necessarily that these organisations lack digital tools. In many cases, they have too many disconnected ones.
“A customer fills a form. A visitor attends an event. A parent submits information. A beneficiary enters a programme. The data exists somewhere. The challenge is what happens next.
“Who follows up? Where is the latest information stored? Can another member of staff understand the history of that relationship?”
Ikoh said the problem could become more serious when organisations depended heavily on individual employees to manage institutional relationships.
He explained that phone numbers could be saved on employees’ personal devices, while important conversations might remain in private WhatsApp chats and critical spreadsheets could be maintained without other members of staff knowing about them.
He said, “That system can function surprisingly well when an organisation is small. Growth changes the equation.
“More customers mean more enquiries. More members mean more records. More programmes mean more registrations and communication. Eventually, what once felt convenient becomes difficult to manage.”
The founders said the problem affected organisations across different sectors, including businesses, schools, churches and non-governmental organisations.
They noted that a church could collect the details of first-time visitors after a service without having an integrated system for follow-up, while schools could maintain separate records for students and parents and use different channels for communication.
For non-profit organisations, they said, information on beneficiaries, volunteers, donors and partners could be maintained by different people and stored on different platforms.
Samuel said the experience prompted the founders to ask whether smaller organisations could manage the people they interacted with, their communications and relevant records from a more connected environment. “That question eventually led to the development of Huboly,” he said.
The platform, according to the founders, is targeted at organisations that may not have the financial resources or technical teams required to operate complex enterprise customer relationship management systems.
They said more than 50 businesses and organisations had signed up during the beta phase.
Ikoh said the objective was not simply to introduce another messaging application but to help organisations maintain clearer records and track activities surrounding their relationships with customers and other stakeholders.
“Our objective is broader than providing another messaging platform,” he said.
“We want organisations to maintain clearer records of the people they interact with and make the activities surrounding those relationships easier to follow.”
The founders said the beta programme was also helping them understand how organisations in different sectors use the platform and identify areas requiring improvement.
They added that some early users were receiving communication credits and discounted access as the company gathered feedback on the product.
The founders, however, acknowledged that the adoption of platforms such as Huboly would depend on factors, including reliability, simplicity, affordability and integration with existing systems.
Samuel said Nigerian technology companies had an opportunity to develop products that reflected the realities of smaller organisations on the continent, rather than simply replicating systems designed for large corporations.
He said, “In Nigeria, smaller organisations frequently operate with a mixture of spreadsheets, mobile phones, messaging applications, email, online forms and informal staff processes.
“The opportunity is not simply to reproduce what already exists elsewhere, but to understand how organisations here actually work.”
The founders said the increasing use of digital platforms meant that organisations would need to move beyond merely getting online to managing the information generated from their digital activities.
Ikoh said, “The first-phase was getting organisations online. The next may be helping them deal with everything they accumulated after getting there.”
He added that digital transformation should increasingly focus on bringing existing systems together instead of continually adding new applications.
“For many small organisations, digital transformation may become less about adding another application and more about creating order among the applications they already use,” he said.
For further details click “https://huboly.com/.”