INTERROGATING DIGITAL STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION AS A CATALYST FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONS:
A STUDY OF KENYA POWER
Keywords:
Digital communication, Strategic communication, Customer relationsAbstract
Strategic communication enables organizations to build, manage and maintain effective relationships with their stakeholders and achieve their goals. However, digital communication, characterised by rapid content generation and sharing and misinformation, poses great challenges to customer relations. The Kenya Power Company (KP) faces myriad challenges, including service disruption, vandalism, and regular power outages, which lead to inconvenience, crisis, and may jeopardise customer satisfaction. Against this backdrop, communication strategies used should be timely and accurate, manage reputational risk, build trust and enhance customer relations. The aim of this paper was to critique digital strategic communication as used to promote customer relations by Kenya Power. The research was anchored on the Relationship Management Theory of Public Relations, espoused by Ledingham and Bruning (1998), which postulates that relationships are created through the principles of commitment, two-way communication, trust, mutual benefit and reciprocity. Using a case study design, qualitative data were collected from KP’s website, Facebook and X between March 2024 and May 2025. 40 KP’s posts, including notices, press statements on power outages, maintenance, and disruptions; service disruptions and improvements, digital customer service and safety together with customer replies, were sampled for the study. The data was studied to identify codes, then categorised into themes and analysed using qualitative thematic content analysis. Findings show that KP has embraced digital strategic communication for customer feedback and service delivery. However, the company's digital communication is characterised by inadequate and delayed customer feedback by customer service call Centre, SMS, automated billing, and online updates; the communication is unreliable, inconsistent and lacks of commitment to customer service and leads to customer frustration and mistrust. The study concludes that poor management of digital strategic communication can contribute to a lack of customer trust, dent organizational image and jeopardize customer relations. The study recommends that KP should provide timely and consistent feedback to customers and synergize its digital communication and service delivery. KP can adopt the use of AI to strategically manage the colossal amount of data generated from digital platforms and offer real-time customer feedback and personalized communication to enhance customer relations.
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