Customer Service: The Kingpin of Business Success in Africa

By Emmanuel Danstan Chinunda

Customer Service: The Kingpin of Business Success in Africa is a must read as it communicates how the power of customer service can revolutionise business on the African continent. The book uses proverbs and wise sayings to captivate the reader into action. The book captures both the African and Western experience to position the reader as a global player in the world of customer service. The book is a change agent and provides a platform how customer service can transform the African continent. The uniqueness of the book is that it uses both Western and African proverbs to help the reader to gain insight into the African culture. It stresses, motivates and inspires the reader to bring revolution to his or her world of service. You will surely bring transformation to your world after mastering the mysteries buried in this book. Its concepts are simple and easy to follow and drive you into business success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Nov 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493138296

Emmanuel Danstan Chinunda

Emmanuel Danstan Chinunda is an international consultant, accredited trainer, public speaker and founder of Arch Professionals, a customer service, management, and training consulting firm based in Malawi. He holds a master of business administration degree from Management College of Southern Africa and a postgraduate certificate in business counselling from the University of Durham in England. He is the proud author of Practical Insights on Customer Service: An African Perspective, Attraction and Retention Strategies at the Institute of People Management in Malawi: Membership Satisfaction and Loyalty, and The Attitude of Success: Powerful Workplace Lessons. He is a competent toastmaster and leader. He has worked as a group general manager, human resources and administration manager, executive director, and a consultant of many years’ practical experience. He has been a board member of Employers Consultative Association of Malawi, a council member and the first executive director of the Institute of People Management of Malawi, former president of Blantyre Toastmasters Club, editor of People Manager Magazine, and former associate consultant in Executive Options International (a customer service consulting firm based in Cape Town in the Republic of South Africa), and he currently sits on several boards. He has personally consulted with many organizations, helping them become more service oriented, and has widely travelled to the United Kingdom, France, Monaco, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, Republic of South Africa, Lesotho, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana. He is a regular public speaker and trainer and can be contacted on 265888829673 or e-mailed at [e-mail].

Book preview

Chapter 1

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.

Sally Gronow, Welsh Water

Customer service is an organisation’s ability to supply their customers’ wants and needs. There are many definitions of customer service, some of which we might attempt to define, but what’s important is to understand its concept.

Excellent customer service is the ability of an organisation to constantly and consistently exceed the customers’ expectations. Therefore, if we are going to consistently exceed customers’ expectations, we have to recognise that every aspect of our business has an impact on customer service. It is interesting to note that sometimes customer service refers to a person or desk which is set up to give general assistance to customers. The success of any company or business lies in the hands of their customers. Once a customer is satisfied with a company, then the company is assured of great profits. It is only our customers who can put up or down the reputation of the company. Advertising is aimed at getting customers to a particular business, but once a customer has arrived or is satisfied, it is important to provide him with an excellent customer service experience. A good customer service experience results in repeat venture to the same business. In fact, customer service is the most important difference between your company and your competitors. The only company which survives in business is the one which gives good customer service.

It doesn’t matter how good your products or processes are; if you don’t have the right people serving customers, you have a great disadvantage. Getting recruitment right from the start is the most important customer service tip you would want to get. Always look for employees who like working with people, are good at solving problems, and who care for others. Ignorance of customer service is a recipe for disaster. In other words, people who fail to provide excellent customer service fall into this scenario because of their lack of knowledge.

Customers are human beings, and as D’Ausilio (2005-2009) says, ‘Twenty five years from now customers will still be human beings driven by desires and needs.’ Simply put, the focus should be on human beings because customers are human beings and not companies. This is an important point of departure in the world of customer service and should always be remembered as such.

The programme of customer service is designed to assist service providers in providing the best service to customers. And this customer is someone who receives a product or service from a service provider and is commonly known by several names, such as passenger, client, buyer, purchaser, shopper, punter, bargain hunter, end user, procurer, or payer. There is an interesting definition of customer as presented by Tlelai: ‘A customer is really anyone who pays me. If they give me the money to do what I do, I am quite happy.’ The author is in favour of this definition.

In any game, before one starts playing, knowledge of the rules is paramount. Customer service is simply defined as the experience which one goes through in life. This seems to be too simplistic. Customer service has more to do with standards. In real life, standards are very important because, like rules, they set the benchmark to which we must conform. These are principles or values expected in any given situation. In Africa, we have institutionalised mediocrity so much that we tend to fail to achieve basic things in life. For instance, an aeroplane flying from one destination to another must have boarding time, take-off time, and landing time, and these must be communicated to passengers, who happen to be known as customers, in advance. In other words, this information should be in the public domain. It is not uncommon to find this not being achieved by an African airline. The reasons for not achieving this may be factual or fabricated depending on what needs to be achieved at that particular point in time. There will always be reasons for failure to meet the agreed targets: the fuel was not available, pilots were having lunch, the plane was being serviced, ground staff reported late for duties because they were attending to a friend’s funeral, the machines were not working, and many other reasons. The result is terrible: the customer is substantially inconvenienced, delayed, and forced to miss the connecting flight. The costs of such actions are much more devastating to the service provider, resulting in loss of income for a good part of their business operation, or indeed to the customer himself, resulting in missing his next appointment.

Customer service seems to be the clay in steel of many African businesses, something that makes it mandatory to first train those intending to join the service world to understand, appreciate, and take customer service as part and parcel of their genetic construction. They must understand that if they are required to give service, the customer must not be put at their mercy; rather they must do what is done conventionally or what is expected in the circumstance. There must not be any joy for deliberate service failures and then accentuated by justifications for the shoddy service. Unreservedly, promises must be kept. People must be treated with respect, and valuing their time and privacy should be of extreme importance in business. Doing what the customer requires must be given priority, and offering a consistent level of service must never be only an option as this is the only way to keep your business flying. In fact, in customer service, even a regular customer should always be treated as a new one. It is like a honeymoon; for the marriage to last, the couple must always treat every day as though it was their honeymoon. There should not be familiarity with customers. After all, familiarity breeds contempt.

In simple terms, what needs to be done is what the customer is looking for and not what the service giver thinks.

A person or business which wants to provide excellent service must invest in customer service training for his or her staff members to be champions in the field. A champion is a person who shows marked superiority. One cannot be a champion when his or her action does not match what customer service entails. Remember that one’s life is the character of things one watches, reads, listens to, or practises. What one is today is an expression of what one put into his or her life yesterday.

Reading materials on excellent customer service are good foundation for successful and excellent customer service delivery. Get ready to learn, be transformed, and be known as an expert in the area of service. Renew your mind by doing away with customer service blinders. By learning and knowing customer service concepts, excellent provision of service becomes as automatic as breathing. A Chinese proverb says, ‘If you are planning for one year, grow rice. If you are planning for twenty years, grow trees. If you are planning for centuries, grow men.’ Aim higher because this time it is the customer who measures organisational performance. Get as equipped as you can because in the world of success, information is the greatest asset. Nelson Mandela once said, ‘Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.’

The word service is also thought of as an acronym, meaning solutions, empowerment, reach, value added, intimacy, creative intuition, and empathy.

Conclusion

Nothing in life works better than customer service. The most important business secret the world over is a satisfied customer. The route to roping in customer satisfaction is to offer excellent customer service. Many people make mistakes because of ignorance in areas of service. As Dr Brian Jude puts it, ‘Many people talk about it but it’s the precious few who get it right.’ The only way to get it right is by exerting effort. You must dig deep in the soil to strike gold. Similarly, if you desire to understand customer service, you must learn its principles and seriously practise its application.

Everyone needs customer service in life because one needs to understand company commitment and philosophy to service excellence, to learn or relearn the skills or procedures to be effective, and to refocus attitudes and commitment to service. Without customers, you do not have a business.

Chapter 2

WHY CUSTOMER SERVICE LACKS IN AFRICA

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.

Donald Porter, VP, British Airways

When facilitating customer care courses as a consultant, the author often ask candidates from various institutions to brainstorm why customer service always poses challenges in their organisations. Amazingly, they come up with a host of reasons as chronicled below.

1. Inadequate training

Most organisations do not take particular interest in training the members of their staff in issues concerning customer care service. No wonder results do not match effort and often do not resonate with their business slogans. Most customer service providers are not adequately trained; as such, they are weak in service provision. Usually, organisations employ service personnel who are not conversant with the business world, yet organisations expect miracles to happen from such people. This is one of the greatest mistakes organisations commit.

2. Lack of teamwork

Most people working in organisations do not work alone; they work in teams. Teamwork is one ingredient of getting things done in an organised fashion. The word team is often considered an abbreviation for ‘together everyone achieves more’. It is also clear that teams work just like a relay race. There are some assignments which require many people of different backgrounds if they are to be accomplished smoothly. In this scenario, different departments work in different formats but with an aim of accomplishing one thing. But more often than not, people work in isolation, to the detriment of customer service. Sometimes even whole departments operate in isolation, a negative tendency referred to as sub-optimisation.

3. Lack of equipment necessary to carry out the assigned work

Some members of staff fail to achieve what they intend to do because of lack of equipment necessary to accomplish the task. Some jobs require special equipment, and if the same is not made available, performance is not guaranteed.

4. Ignorance of customers

Some service personnel take advantage of the ignorance of customers. In fact, customers have rights, though most of them know little about this. This gap in knowledge on the part of customers makes it almost impossible for them to demand reinforcement of these rights. For instance, a customer has a right to minimal level of customer care, to have his or her complaints heard and listened to, and to enjoy common courtesy from the members of staff. If he or she does not know about such rights, he or she is bound to receive shoddy service. Conversely, customer confidence in the services provided by companies plummets as companies’ reliability attribute becomes difficult to sustain. This negative trend tends to drive customers away from the business. Loss of goodwill often follows as negative media coverage creates a negative image in the eyes of customers.

5. Most workers are afraid

Authority level is one area that requires special attention in customer service. Most front-line personnel are afraid to use initiative to get things done or going even when they have the answer to the problem facing a customer at hand. Because such members of staff do not have the authority to suggest or make a decision, customer service suffers. This is why customers tend to like to deal with people who have authority because they know they will have immediate answers in the face of problems.

6. Late procurement of raw materials

Sometimes materials to be used are procured late, forcing the customer to wait for a long time. Instead of being proactive in taking immediate action, one would miss the opportune time, a situation that leads to poor customer service. In some cases, high levels of breakdowns greatly inconvenience customers. Such customers may demand refunds, resulting in loss of revenues by the service providers.

7. Inadequate generation of electricity and intermittent power and water supply

It is common knowledge that these days most machines operate from electricity. However, the challenge now is that one is not sure when one shall lose power. It is not uncommon for electricity to go off, forcing customers to wait for hours on end. A common example is of till operators in stores which use tills operating from electricity. In times of blackouts, such operators are seen idling. This state of affairs does affect service in a big way. Bayo Adeola, in his write-up in New African, ‘The Electricity Conundrum’ in October (2010: 61), asks, ‘Should we not ask ourselves why, almost a dozen years after the democratic dispensation, we have still not been able to improve the electricity situation?’

Frequent power blackouts lead to poor quality of service. This is one area Africa as a continent has to greatly improve.

In most African countries, there is inadequate power generation, and the little power generated is unable to drive machines, forcing rotating outages or load-shedding as a solution. In some cases, power goes off as a very important activity is going on. This sorry state sometimes is compounded by unavailability of generators. In some cases, generators may be available, but fuel to power them is scarce and hardly there on the market. This makes the whole exercise of using electricity futile. Again the use of generators and fuel increases operational costs, leading to a loss of income by the firm.

As if the electricity problem alone is not enough, water taps run dry frequently, and it is no news at all to the service providers. The reasons for such inconveniences range from aging infrastructure in which service providers experience frequent breakdowns and pipe bursts, capacity of old infrastructure not in tandem with the current population boom, vandalism, and unplanned treatment works.

8. Motivation of staff

Low morale experienced by members of staff due to negative treatment of them as employees creates fear in them, forcing them to develop a negative perception of the organisation. Such perceptions can arise from uncertainties and continue even from disturbances created by angry customers due to cancelled schedules, often at short notice. Sometimes legal actions being taken by suppliers or creditors cause panic in the minds of the members of staff, leading to resignations. In some cases, employees are not given ample time to rest; as such, they spend a lot of time not being rejuvenated, and they work while tired.

9. Communication

Failure by service providers to communicate confidently with the customer results in problems. For instance, a service bill reaching an amount that calls for disconnection unless settled, makes the customer angry with service providers. The service provider could send a message to the customer about the service nearing suspension instead of taking a drastic action of denying him or her service even when he or she