Customer Service: Breaking Companies!

By Isaac Twumasi Quantus in Accra.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who does a lot of business across Africa. He mentioned one of the things he hates most about doing anything in Africa is the lack of customer service he experiences as a client of many African businesses both large and small. I hate the term customer service because it often makes people think of corporations that have draconian ideas about how their staff have to treat customers.

What I mean by customer service is the basic ideology of respecting your customers and treating their time like it is valuable. This concept is what drives business the world over. If you are in Japan and you are late for a meeting, you might just spend the next two weeks trying to make it up to the company. In Germany time, respect, efficiency and money are just as important to the business world as in America or Britain. It is not an ‘American’ thing (as I have heard many people accuse) it is a business thing. It is simple, when time equals money then literally everything has a value.

What causes this? Well for one there is some cultural truth to what my friends biggest complaint was. In Africa, for many, time is very much still a relative concept. I have literally waited for an hour for a special hire taxi after being told he was “five minutes away”. This is not the exception, it is an everyday occurrence!

Going out to dinner in Africa can either be a delight or a nightmare. In some places it can take as long as thirty minutes to even order and just as long or longer to ask for the bill!

 

The service industry here tends to not respond to promptness unless it is forced upon them by management. That might be just fine if you are tourist here to enjoy a few days of safari and you want to experience the local culture. In that scenario time becomes somewhat relative to you too, and you do not care as much. For the business class this is not possible. For businesses to grow there needs to be structure and punctuality. There also needs to be a high sense of accountability.

I have often noticed that somehow it because ‘my fault’ when I ask a server for a bill because I am late somewhere and I need to leave. If I call a special hire and they are late, I have no problem calling back and canceling. Yet, somehow it is become ‘my fault’ for inconveniencing the driver who had to come from across town.

The concept of valuing the person who is paying you for your service is often a foreign thing.

Whether this means anything to Africans or not is irrelevant, these are conditions that the rest of the world business community has little patience for. So before a good portion of the world engages African businesses I suspect this will have to change.

Do you know how much revenue your business loses each year because customers are dissatisfied with the service they experience? Few businesses sit down and do the maths about how many customers and transactions they lose as a result of poor service in a financial year, but the cost for the average big business is likely to be substantial.

 

This article was originally posted on Africa Marketing Communications

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