Mfonobong Inyang: Four Perspectives Through The Lens of Customer Service Week

I subscribe to many brands’ newsletters, and on October 7th, 2024, my email inbox exploded with their messages. Some of the emails were ironic because I haven’t enjoyed excellent service from those brands. What struck most companies invest more in PR than in developing a great product for their customers. While the theme for this year’s Customer Service Week is “Above and Beyond”, I’m not sure the customer is king in Nigeria; I reckon the customer is not even anywhere near the palace. This made me contemplate the state of customer service in Nigeria, and I came up with four points to consider.

Self

The admonition, “love your neighbour as yourself” is profound on so many levels. One of the immediate deductions from the phrase is that it can be difficult for a person who doesn’t love himself or herself to love another person. From the abundance of a person’s heart, their mouths will speak – people can only give what they have. On X the other day, one bro put it best: “I hate how Nigeria makes polite people appear weak.” No truer words have ever been spoken. It seems that our default setting in Nigeria is to be rude; you almost have to show a bit of madness to navigate the road when driving. Do you know that old saying that the first words you learn from another language are usually cuss words? From childhood, most of us in the hood defined our street credibility in part by how well we could pick up Ws from a yabis session. Does “you dey kpongbolo cigar!” sound familiar? Some other quotes are not printable but you get the gist; the kids who couldn’t roast other kids were seen as weak and subsequently bullied. I know this because I was one of those kids you can’t mess with; not necessarily because I could throw hands but with my words, I could make grown kids cry. Thank God for emotional intelligence, I have come a mighty from being that smallie to a more self-aware version of myself – even though there is still a sprinkle of jagun jagun ear and dear.

In the famous words of Socrates, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Many uncouth or rude people aren’t necessarily bad folks; they use being caustic as a coping or defence mechanism. For example, a salty lady may be uppity to men as a projection of her insecurities after being served breakfast by her former lover. It doesn’t help that popular culture doesn’t encourage civility; on social media, there is an endless competition over who can bring the greatest gbas gbos to a conversation or who can drag a person the most. It’s all fun and games until we bring that attitude to the big league; the most consequential stages of our lives. One country I deeply admire for its culture of respect for fellow citizens is Japan. Japanese etiquette is not just limited to bowing to other people, we all saw how some fans cleaned up after themselves after a football match at the World Cup.

This is why I encourage people to invest in personal development so they can manifest their highest selves. Sign up for Neurolinguistic Programming Classes (NLP). Read books like Tim LaHaye’s “Why You Act the Way You Do,” Abiola Salami’s “The Magic of Emotional Intelligence” and James Clear’s “Atomic Habits.” If you are a person of faith, I strongly encourage you to study holy books regularly, not just from a religious perspective – this is because nobody knows about a product and how it should function more than the manufacturer. Paul shared some OT with his protégé, Timothy, “Remember what you were taught from your childhood from the Holy Scrolls which can impart to you wisdom”.

Family

A lot of the way we talk or address issues have their origins in how we were raised. Some people’s childhood conditioned them to have anger issues; that’s why it always seems they are shouting even when the situation doesn’t warrant raising the decibel level. If you were raised in a typical African home, this type of conversation will look familiar:

Child: Mummy, where can I put this plate?

African mother: Put it on my head. You hear? Put it on my head since you don’t have enough sense to put it in the washer.

Such exchange appears innocuous and we laugh over it in hindsight but most people unconsciously adopted that model in responding to simple enquiries. They will hurl insults at you or make snide remarks instead of just politely addressing your request. Some of what was referred to as discipline that year sparked the seeds of childhood trauma and most adults are still playing out their childhood traumas in the form of tantrums. The family is very important because it’s the first place we learn about relationships and if we are not presented with great models, we are more likely to become unhealthy adults.

Deep this, have you ever been nice or courteous to someone, especially of the opposite sex and they immediately inferred that you have a crush on them or you wanted something else? Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who became uncomfortable with you being too nice? They are effectively sabotaging great relationships because they equate having a peaceful relationship to being in a boring relationship. Such people have unfortunately defined conflict as a sign of love, that’s why they find it hard to leave abusive relationships. We joke about it a lot but it is Stockholm Syndrome that makes good girls love bad boys; they will leave the one that buys them flowers and treats them like a queen to follow the one that is a low-budget Tyson Fury. Don’t enter into another relationship until you heal properly or go for therapy otherwise, you will keep bleeding on people who didn’t cut you.

Business/Institutions

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, that’s true every day of the week and twice on Sundays – not forgetting public holidays. Whenever I experience writer’s block, three options get me back into the zone – rest, credit alert or hot amala! You may have heard this before especially if you are familiar with the hood you know the saying, “If the lady that is selling the amala is not rude, then the amala is not sweet”. Again, we laugh over it but that is a synecdoche to how most businesses are run; customer service is almost non-existent – at best, it is treated as an afterthought. Some days ago, most customers in a top-tier bank couldn’t access their funds for days and I can’t remember a formal apology or statement being issued. The marketing mix has four Ps: products, place, promotion and price – most organisations focus on promotion alone. This is why some telecommunications service providers have the best ads but have the worst cellular networks. To make it worse, classism is another signature in most private organisations. Anyhowness is normalised except you are perceived to be a high-networth individual. Certain businesses only addressed some complaints about their service delivery because the matter blew up on social media, thousands of similar complaints never got addressed because the customer had no notoriety.

Public institutions suffer more from entitlement mentality and negligence. Have you ever walked into an office and been made to wait because the person you came to see has gone for prayers during working hours? How is a police report more important than saving the life of a person who was rushed to a hospital? As a graduate, do you know that you can miss out on collecting your transcript simply because you forgot to greet someone in the admin office? Have you seen at the marriage registry that the officials demand an ‘offering’ from the couple for doing his or her job? Let me say this one with my full chest: as a man in Abuja, if you walk into a government parastatal and you are not dressed in a well-ironed and starched-up senator wear with an expensive car, hardly will be taken seriously or will your issue be addressed with urgency. There are few exceptions, of course, some people in the civil service are diligent at their duty posts but to find a person wey gets that kind mind na connection. Why is the main security agency that relates directly to citizens being described as the Nigerian Police Force? It should be the Nigerian Police Service because that’s exactly what is being offered – a public service. The word force has its etymology in colonialism, where the police were originally designed to protect the colonizers and keep the locals in check. From personal and anecdotal experiences, the average Nigerian doesn’t believe that the police are his or her friend.

Government

Nothing exposes the primal nature of the average Nigerian like politics; a lot of people have unravelled right before our very eyes – some people are yet to recover from the shock. Three things amplify what is a person’s heart – power, sex and power. Saul felt shy on his inauguration day but when he became king, his tyrannical rule made even Samuel, a major prophet, get too scared to discharge his duties freely. In Nigeria, when we see a leader who respects us enough to explain his intention to systematically remove subsidies – we say he is a weak leader. Na Iron Man we like, Tony Stark and the Avengers. If we see a leader who can intelligently articulate a cogent plan to move the economy from consumption to production, we say things like, “na statistics we go chop?” We brag about supporting a leader even if the only certification he has is a “NEPA bill” but when asked to vote for those whose scholarly exploits are well-documented, we say “he didn’t convince me enough”. We despise politicians who follow the rule of law and don’t share money by saying things like, “dis wan no sabi politics, she should step down”. Yet we embrace those that snatch, grab and run away with the people’s mandate. We hail them as “master strategists”. Make I give una one update: to know how a person thinks – pay close attention to them during elections.

Most people in public office don’t believe they are in government to serve their customers (citizens). Ace comedian, Okey Bakassi, said something profound recently, “it takes politicians becoming victims before they effect changes”. That is why a leader in the legislature can say amid pervasive hunger and poverty, “You can protest, we will be there eating”. Remember when bad fuel was imported into the country and it destroyed the engines of most cars at great expense to their owners, who took responsibility for that? How many times have our faves done media interviews since the last elections? That’s because they don’t respect the electorates they claim to represent enough to even communicate with them. Most of what we call customer protection policies in Nigeria are at best performative. Riddle me this, how come the price of PMS can rise arbitrarily to “reflect market realities” but private organisations are sanctioned for doing the same thing? Compared to PMS, is cable television or internet service an essential or public service? You see how we take common sense and turn it on its head in this country, then we turn around and say we are looking for foreign direct investments. As an economist, I know enough to say that price control especially the way we deploy it here is Communism 101 with a sprinkle of state capture – it has no place in a free market.

Celebrating Customer Service Week is cute but what really moves the needle is a fundamental shift in our thinking.