CUSTOMER IS KING BUT THERE IS A KING MAKER

It is morning and the hall is already bustling with activities; staff members are dressed in their best Ankara dresses. It has become a yearly tradition of showcasing their best Ankara wears, stilettos or sandals, braids packed in doughnuts, faces glazed with Tara make-ups, smiles miles too wide, ladies sashaying and the men acting super cool – all of them huddled together, looking like glossy characters in a glam magazine.

It is customer service week. This week-long international celebration of customers and the service people is done every first week of October. For many banks, the halls are well decorated like it is Christmas already. Business opens each day with exaggerated fanfare and customers are stunned by the smiling faces waiting to serve them. Candies and cakes are served intermittently, or kept at points where customers would easily serve themselves. And on the last day of the celebration, a TGIF party is thrown in the banking hall or at an expensive club and staff members party like the world would end that night.

Services have become homogeneous; what is obtainable in one bank is found in the next. The only difference is in the service delivery. And for a business that wishes to sustain progress, emphasis should be placed on “satisfaction.” I will come back to this later.
Customer service determines if customers make return purchases or if they would quietly end their business relationship with you. Days are gone when customers are treated like they had come to beg for crumbs falling off the banks’ tables. Internet brought about online real-time banking and it swallowed the old manual ledger system. This led to aggressive competition; and yes, competition became the yardstick that whups your ass silly until you do like your mates are doing. Else, close shop and get out of the way. Or park well and look out for what your competitors are not doing well. Steal ideas and re-package them in shiny wrappers. Just like it was done with some savings accounts now having current account features, or the current account with saving account features. Businessmen are lured in for better, fleshier kill. They become your prey for life.

The April 2013 KPMG report on Banking Industry Customer Satisfaction Survey (BICSS) rated GTBank as the most Customer-Focused Bank while Zenith Bank occupies the second position. You are tempted to ask – “What the hell are other banks doing at below 70% customer satisfaction since these two banks never got to 80%? Isn’t that some sort of abuse on their loyal customers’ sensibilities?”

Were you to carry out an independent internal customer satisfaction survey and ask staff members these basic questions – Are you satisfied? Why are you not satisfied? Does it affect your service delivery? – you would be alarmed at the responses or the tensed silences. But in those spaces where bankers meet to talk over bottles of beers and nkwobi – at bars or eateries, at wedding ceremonies or parties – you would finally listen in, after guards have been let down, to the emotional topics that range from sexual abuse to mental abuse to victimisation to under-appreciation to under-payment to target-chasing.
Abuse leads to silence or obvious revolt.

For the abused housemaids, you discover that they revolt these ways – from poisoning their madam’s food, to pissing in babies’ meals, to beating their madam’s children, to locking up the kids in dark wardrobes – their own version of an-eye-for-an-eye. They become the horror story.

For the banker, they kill customer satisfaction and this is a huge threat to a business.
Set up a perfect system, design an easy process flow, put in the disgruntled staff, the customer walks in and you have bad service. Then KPMG captures the bad service.
Our emotions determine our moods which determine how we serve. There is just little much our sensibilities can take. Because while you strive to keep the positive spirit, you get hit by the nausea that comes with under-appreciation, especially when your employer pays bonuses to the “full staff members”, while you, the under-paid outsourced staff, who does the job of a full staff, who is paid 30% the salary of the entry-level full staff, who faces the customers, who can kill the business “maintains” because “good things cometh to those who wait upon the Lord.” You struggle against these forces, against sexual abuses or victimisation. And then you explode. And your customers suffer.

KPMG camera clicks.
What the financial industry should do every customer service week is:
Contract KPMG to carry out internal customer satisfaction survey
Create a department to deal with issues raised
Set up a department to monitor when last a staff was promoted or was allowed to go on leave

And this: why would a bank outsource their staff from companies owned by their executive directors, or managing directors (as was the case of Cecilia Ibru), or relatives/wives and friends of these directors?

And this: the degree of job responsibility and risks this cadre of staff members are exposed to should be simultaneous with their income.

In between these issues are the reason superior customer service is yet to be achieved in our banking industry. This is the reason we are haunted with the reports of disgruntled staff ruining the banking application software or crumbling the day’s business. And this can be checked.

Truly, the customer is king; but the staff member is the king maker.

Written by Ukamaka Olisakwe