9 minute read
Listening to the voice of the client
Conversation with servant-leader GPAA CEO, Kedibone Madiehe
“I’m a typical example of a person that made a career out of client services because I grew up in the ranks,” says Kedibone Madiehe, the CEO of the Government Pensions Administration Agency (GPAA). Her journey began in the private sector, where she spent 12 years, before joining the public sector as a General Manager for Client Relations Management. She’s been in the public sector for 9 years and in November 2022 she was appointed chief executive officer of GPAA.
TAKING CARE OF MEMBERS
The GPAA is tasked with the administration of pension benefits, funds and schemes on behalf of its customers, which are National Treasury and the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF).
The core business of GPAA is mainly rendering services such as disbursement of military pensions, post-medical retirement subsidies, special pensions and payments for injury on duty as well as administration of government employees’ pension benefits on behalf of its customers.
Before becoming CEO, Kedibone led a Client Relationship Management business unit, which is responsible for managing relationships with stakeholders, including clients (members and beneficiaries), customers (National Treasury and GEPF) and employer departments, which Kedibone describes as being at the coalface of GPAA’s operations.
BROKER CONSULTANT TO CEO
Kedibone originally comes from a small town in the eastern Free State called Bohlokong. Her mother was a radiographer, making a living in the city, and Kedibone joined her in Pretoria as a pre-teen as she was raised by her late grandmother. She matriculated from Iona Convent School for Girls - which happens to be down the road from the GPAA offices. It is an Irish Catholic School and she was taught by nuns and priests and her religious background is still solid due to Catholicism teachings which are similar to the Anglican teachings, although she is Anglican by religion.
After her matric, she enrolled at the University of Cape Town, completing a degree in International Relations and Public Administration. Once she completed her undergraduate degree she enrolled for a postgraduate diploma in Organisational Management, followed by her Honours degree in International Relations, still at the University of Cape Town. She later graduated with her Masters in Business Administration (MBA) in 2015. Her dream as a teenager was to become a Diplomat / Ambassador, but she soon realised that getting her qualifications was not enough for her to just join the Department of International Relations upon graduating. Her career began as a Broker Consultant at Momentum.
She was later appointed as the Client Services Manager in the Call Centre on the medical side of the conglomerate, MMI Holdings, and later became a Senior Manager in Customer Experience focusing as an Administrator for Government Employees Medical Schemes (GEMS). “When I started I worked in employee benefits and retirement investments, you know, shortterm and long-term investments,” explains Kedibone. “But when I became a Client Services Manager and later a Senior Manager Customer Experience, I started in a completely different environment.”
The opportunity to be the CEO of the GPAA was a challenge that Kedibone did not shy away from. Instead, her approach was to ask herself what it was that she could do better at the organisation, knowing that she could make a difference.
Her leadership style is fluid, which sees her adapting to the requirements of the situation. Some situations call for a more direct, autocratic approach. Other situations may require a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach. One must leave room for compromise, but there are certain areas where a firmer stance is needed.
“I don’t compromise when it comes to work ethics. But when a person gives so much and achieves their targets, it means they love their work and take accountability,” work . explains Kedibone.
The GPAA’s Mandate
The GPAA is responsible for the administration of pension benefits, funds and schemes on behalf of its customers, which are national treasury and the government employees Pension fund (GEPF).
GOING A STEP FURTHER
“I had my own vision that I had to sell: what the difference would be,” she says. “You have to look at people, process and technology.” She explains using a phrase inspired by the call centre environment and regional and mobile offices environment, where agents interact with members daily: “The voice of the client”. Kedibone appreciates the importance of the feedback they receive from clients.
“You hear the complaints and you have to ask yourself, ‘what is it that we’re doing wrong?’ Then you realise that there are areas of improvement, in terms of people, process and technology.”
It’s her responsibility to ensure that the administration system is reliable and capable of meeting requirements. “How do we do that?”
She quickly realised that, when it comes to how the GPAA is structured, the organisation is centralised, with much of its work taking place in their offices in Pretoria. With the majority of the GPAA’s employees being in the regional offices, decentralisation is key to the GPAA improving on its already splendid performance. But that doesn’t mean too much has to be decentralised - certain aspects of payments need to be decentralised to ensure they are efficient.
Where decentralisation can play a pivotal role is in the area of unclaimed benefits. Kedibone’s first priority was to fund the implementation of a strategy to deal with unclaimed benefits, which she points out is a huge challenge in the pension industry at large. It’s important for beneficiaries to receive what they’re entitled to, unfortunately they don’t always know that there are benefits they can claim. The plan she implemented was designed to deal directly with the factors that lead to benefits not being claimed.
“Data cleansing is an example. We prioritise all the data cleansing because if we don’t have clean data, we can’t communicate effectively to our members.” “We’re going to expand our mobile offices outreach for unclaimed benefits, and we’re going to invigorate communication.” The GPAA is already in the process of finding regional service agents across the country.
“Secondly, we are currently automating a lot of our processes, such as the scanning of documentation and ensuring we have a state-of-the-art workflow distribution process to ensure member first contact resolution,” says Kedibone. “We are busy with the replacement of the legacy system that we have within the institution. And we’ve gone out in the market and benchmarked ourselves - seeing what other pension funds are doing in terms of system automation, workflow automation, distribution etc.”
The priority at the moment is to use automation to make their processes more efficient than what a manual approach can offer.
“They say it’s better to send five lions to the battlefield than five hundred sheep. That’s what automation is all about. Instead of having five hundred people do the job, just get five lions - which are state-of-the-art systems.” With excess capacity we are able to deploy excess resources to provide one-on-one engagement with employer departments and unclaimed benefits.
Next up on her list of priorities is improving the internal turnaround time. Part of this is finding solutions to the challenges related to documentation that needs to be supplied by the employer which can lead to delays in payment of pension benefits. The GPAA has been engaging with the employer, the Department of Public Service Administration, to address this challenge and continues to engage with other stakeholders.
“We started to have constructive engagements with various regulatory bodies like the Public Service Commission, to see how they can assist us,” says Kedibone. At the heart of this is her emphasis on client-centricity, which requires a shift in thinking, keeping in mind that failure to perform has real-world consequences such as members being unable to provide for their families.
Another priority Kedibone mentions is curbing fraud from external parties. The GPAA is looking into a biometric system to deal with the use of fake identification documents and the Department of Home Affairs is integral to reducing such cases.
HIGH STANDARDS
“Don’t fix it if it’s not broken,” says Kedibone. “There are a lot of things that are being done very well in this institution.”
“We measure our success through the achievement of our annual performance plan. We measure our success through service level agreements. And, most of all, we measure our success through the voice of the customer.”
“If you contact our call centre, you have the opportunity to give us a client satisfaction survey. If you go visit our walk-in centres, you can measure our service.”
The GPAA has designed the survey to not only measure performance based on individual cases, but the whole end-to-end process. Kedibone is happy to share that 94% of the members are giving brilliant ratings.
“We always say one complaint is one too many.”
When analysing the negative feedback, the GPAA finds that most are about benefits not being paid on time. “What I do with my team, to ensure we do not get found wanting, when we do our operational and strategic plan, we say ‘let’s concentrate on all the cases that are about to be out of the service level agreement and ensure that we process older cases first.’”
But some delays are merely due to the fact that the GPAA has rigorous processes, with checks and balances, which ensure that payments are accurate with a very small margin for error and immunity to fraudulent attacks
This focus on improving performance is done with the knowledge that working in the public sector is about service. Kedibone calls on us all to be servant-leaders: “It’s important to be humble. That’s number one. Be a servant-leader and let’s all be accountable. As a government component, we’re also responsible for directly and indirectly achieving the goals in the National Development Plan 2030. We are also responsible for the achievement of the medium-term strategic framework and its priorities.
“We must never forget that we are contributing towards the greater goals of the National Development Plan, which is to eradicate the triple challenge of unemployment, inequality and poverty.
“We are serving that mandate and it’s important to stay grounded and always do the right thing.”
