EcoCash adds bank transaction auto-reversals to its growing range of self-care services

ECOCASH, Zimbabwe’s largest mobile money service, has introduced auto-reversals for unsuccessful bank transactions via its platform, a move that instantly cuts the customer’s waiting time from over 24 hours to about five minutes.

The EcoCash bank auto-reversal innovation is the latest addition to a wide range of automated customer support services that the company launched recently, for the convenience of its millions of users.

Last week, Eddie Chibi, the chief executive of Cassava Smartech Zimbabwe, the holding company of EcoCash, said the group was focused on enhancing customer experience by leveraging digital innovations to deliver convenient, automated customer solutions.

“We believe that the success of our products and services is driven by the experience of our customers, which enables repeat usage, convenience and ultimately customer loyalty,” he said.

“To that end, our teams have been working hard to roll out various digital innovations to ensure our customers have a hassle-free journey when they use our products and interact with our services, especially at this time the world is battling to cope with the effects of COVID-19.”

Last week, EcoCash announced the automation of PIN resets as well as automatic reversals for failed peerto-peer transactions of funds sent via EcoCash by mistake to the wrong number.

It also announced the introduction of auto-reversals for failed transactions for customers purchasing ZESA tokens.

A small percentage of the huge volumes of mobile and electronic transactions handled by EcoCash and local banks fail due to different reasons — including, among others, power or network connectivity issues at any point between the initiator of the transaction and the recipient, or the handling infrastructure in between.

But although the number of customers affected is relatively very small, the inconvenience this can cause to the affected customer is huge.

“This is why we have moved to automate this function in order to eliminate the waiting period and remove the inconvenience to customers,” Chibi said.

“The automation of these functions has already resulted in a significant drop in traffic to our customer touch points, as failed transactions are automatically reversed back into customers’ wallets in less than 5 minutes.” Chibi attributed the EcoCash platform capabilities to automate a wide range of services to the upgrade of the mobile money platform’s core operating system about a year ago.

He noted that the EcoCash upgrade added modules to the platform that offer customers extra convenience, along with tighter security.

The Cassava chief executive said all banked EcoCash customers could now reverse an unsuccessful transaction to the source account in less than five minutes.

“This is a massive improvement from the manual process which took 24 hours to reverse failed transactions,” said Chibi, adding that all banks integrated with EcoCash were now connected to the automation system.

Last week, following the unveiling of more automated services, EcoCash said over 70% of traffic to all their customer touch-points was because of two human selfinduced errors: PIN Resets and peer-to-peer transaction reversals when a customer sends money to the wrong person.

“We have launched the EcoCash Web Portal as well as the USSD solution, that will empower the customers to reset their own PIN numbers as well as initiate the funds reversal process. The Web and USSD initiatives are very safe and easy to use,” the company said.

Customers can use the USSD solution by dialling *150#, or by accessing the EcoCash selfcare web portal by making a once-off registration on https://selfcare.ecocash.co.zw/portal/.