The State of Customer Service in Nigeria

In Nigeria, some companies participate in this celebration, and they make effort in telling their customers how they mean to them. I wouldn’t know the exact number of companies that participate in this celebration, but some do.

Perhaps the big companies and few other companies participate in it. I am concerned with SME owners in this article.

Look at this scenario: you go into a store, and you politely ask for a particular product from the store owner or sales rep as the case may be, but they tell you there is nothing like that in their store, but they have other types of product that you should buy instead. You try to explain to them why you wouldn’t want to buy another product, but they refuse to let it go, they tell you how you don’t know that this product they are pushing you to buy might even be better than the one you’re are asking for. You decline, and then they start acting rude to you, just because you don’t want to buy something you don’t need to buy. Is that a nice situation?

If I don’t buy something from you today, does that mean I wouldn’t buy something from you tomorrow or does mean I wouldn’t refer someone to you, so the person can come and patronize you?

Why treat a customer with disdain because he/she doesn’t buy something from you?

I have experienced the above scenario quite a number of times, and I do feel bad and leave with a bad memory or experience while being in contact with the business.

That is an example of poor customer service; I had a bad customer experience, which resulted from a bad customer service.

No doubt, it can be annoying if customers come in a store, and ask for the price of different things but end up not buying. However, have you thought about if the customer can still come round next week, next month, next year, to buy something from you?

As a customer, once I have a bad customer experience with a company, it might be hard to consider the company or business as one of the places to go and buy things from.

And so, what is customer experience?

Customer experience is simply the feeling or memory a customer or prospective customer has whenever he or she comes in contact with your business.

The contact in the above definition implies, whenever the person either come in contact with your product physically or online, or visit your social media profiles or websites, or visit your company, etc.

And so, the impression that contact leaves on a customer, is the experience a customer has.

And this experience has a lot to do with whether the customer might come back later on, refer you to someone, or even talk about your business in a good way.

So, here’s a question to ask yourself; how do you treat your customers? Do your customers have a good or bad experience whenever they come in contact with your business?

To improve customer experience in Nigeria, here are some few tips that can be considered;

1. Incorporate customer service in the company: it has been said several times that customer service goes beyond the customer service department of any organisation. Customer service involves every staff of an organisation. Any staff of the organisation can either leave a positive or negative impression on a customer or prospective customer. Likewise, any staff can motivate a customer to patronize your business.
2. Pay attention to what your customer needs: if your customer sees that you are paying attention to their needs, they will even be more loyal to you because they can see that you regard their opinions.
3. Show appreciation to your customers: you can set out time to call your customers or send out gifts to them, just to appreciate their patronage.
4. Get customer feedbacks: you can draw up a series of questions to know what your customers think about your business. This can be very effective if the right questions are asked in the right way.