What is customer service?
Customer service is the voice of any company. When a customer needs help, they reach out to the customer service section of the business. This section’s role is to ensure customer satisfaction with the hopes of that individual becoming a loyal customer or repeat customer. The company can either provide great support, provide mediocre support, or provide insufficient support.
Where do Nigerians fail at customer service?
Many Nigerians do not know the importance of training customer support staff to have empathy, crisis de-escalation, and customer service speech. Due to inadequate training and management, many Nigerian customer services we engage and interact with are rude and ill manners, clinging on the fence of an ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude. They make customers feel unwanted, and it warrants customers not to repeat purchase.
What are some examples of lousy client portfolio management?
I recently had an issue with an IT hosting company in Nigeria; they had previously asked me to upgrade to a larger plan. When I had upgraded, I asked the support staff for help in moving files, to which they responded by asking me to pay an additional NGN5,000 for support. This made me want to cease all dealings with them, not because I could not afford to pay, but because of the lack of empathy they responded to me with. It worse because they took three days to tell me they would be unable to help me until I paid additional money. After many emails went unanswered, I decided to leave reviews on websites like Trustpilot and site jabber. They responded after I had left bad reviews online.
There things you have to take into consideration from this case study.
- Time: Taking long periods to respond to a customer’s problems will lead them to look for companies with better support.
- Clarity: If there are additional costs or fees that need to be charged, the customer should be pre-informed.
- Empathy: Responses are everything when you meet a customer that has a problem with the company. You have to use customer service speech.
- Bad reviews: When customers are upset, they tell other people. They may also review your website or service on google, site jabber, or trust pilot. It is harder to change an upset.
Read Part 2 here:
Similar opinions:
https://guardian.ng/business-services/poor-customer-service-is-killing-businesses-in-nigeria/