By Eze Nwagbaraji

The only true driver of any business success in competitive markets is customer service.  Even in less competitive market environments, poor customer service endangers respect for businesses that approach the customer with nonchalant attitudes.

Astute investment bankers and market participants, who invest in private or public corporations, pay great attention to the effectiveness of customer service regimes within a corporation’s culture. Effective customer services regimes are the anchors on which market penetration is built. It defines the corporate identity, ensures its continuity, retains customer loyalty, and acts as guarantee to continued positive returns on invested assets.

There is ample evidence across all facets of businesses across the world that show that corporations that position customer service as a core philosophy in the hierarchy of importance in their corporate vision, tend to take away market shares from less customer focused corporations.  Effective customer service and the ability to increase market share are the primary inducements that attract investible capital into a corporation, irrespective of the industry.

Customer service is the corporate commitment and ability to earn the trust of the customers, one customer at a time. It is the provision of service to the customer before, during, and after a purchase or an encounter. It is further a series of activities genuinely designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction, i.e. gaining the trust and confidence of the customer that the product or service has met the customer’s expectation.

The stars of effective customer services within the Nigerian market environments include the hospitality industry and the numerous eateries and fast food industries. Some of our hotels boast some of the most efficient staff and service providers second to none.

The cooperative attitude and calm demeanor of some of the staff within these industries are text book examples of efficiency. The numerous fast food establishments popping up across the country have also continued to match some of the examples set by the hospitality industry.

On the other hand is the unwholesome experience customers increasingly encounter within most of the leading commercial banks and some of the airlines in Nigeria.

Doing business with some of these banks – UBA, First Bank, Zenith, Intercontinental Bank, Oceanic Bank, etc. have become increasingly cumbersome and even if a customer has to cash a cheque or withdraw money from his own account, such miniscule transactions take hours to complete within these institutions in such areas as the Wuse Market in Abuja.

The automated teller machines (ATM) installed in several of the bank facilities malfunction most of the time, especially on weekends and some of these banks charge their own account holders fees for using ATMs on their premises. Zenith Bank for example tags on additional fees on deposits made by students paying for their tuitions at the Nigerian Law School, where they maintain a monopoly.

Dana Airline notoriously keeps its passengers at the airports for hours without adequate notice on why passengers are stranded. At the National Hospital in Abuja, one of the leading federal medical centers in Nigeria, the customer control mechanism is non-existent. Whether you arrived at the hospital at 7.00 a.m. or 9.00 a.m. there are no mechanisms to orderly ensure that first customers are served before subsequent ones.

The Register Attendant who only opens whenever he or she comes to the office is locked in a cubicle, the patients or customers have to struggle to get a card or slip to enable their files be pulled or be registered. These customer service failures are also found in such institutions as the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

The disdain with which some of these institutions treat their customers is appalling. How can one justify situations where public or customer toilet (rest room) in a bank does not have toilet papers, does not have running water, dirty, or in some cases out of order.

These institutions spend huge sums of money taking out newspaper and online advertisements attempting to lure customers to their services, but fail to accentuate the most rudimentary aspect of business survival, i.e. retain their existing customers through an effective service delivery experience.

Customer service is an integral component of a company’s customer value proposition. Customers have memories and they will remember you whether you like it or not. Their trust and confidence can be destroyed at once by a major service problem or it can be minimized through incremental or daily weeding away of trust, with several demonstrations of incompetence, intolerance, or nonchalance.

A corporate culture is the sum of the beliefs and values that the corporation’s members share and is carried out through what those who represent the corporation do and how they do it. A hostile, incompetent, or nonchalant corporate culture is an indictment of the management of such corporation.

Within free markets, when an institution fails to evaluate the impact of its decisions, behaviors, and communications on its customers, such institution is surviving on borrowed time. The management is engaged in disservice to the real owners of such institution, the shareholders, and overtime, through loss in market shares and market competitive advantage, will begin to experience diminished income.

These are the primary reasons why effective management teams spend time and scarce resources to maintain customer friendly relationships and take the extra step to assure customers that the institution is in business to service the interest of the customer.

These are some of the reasons why that friendly face at the entrance of an eatery calmly greets the customer upon approach, the friendly gate man at the hotel opens the door, and the reasons why assistants at the hotel offer to wash the patrons car.

On an international basis, customer service is the sole reason why corporations like Amazon.com (NASDQ: AMZN), an American online store has become one of the world’s largest retailers with market capitalization of US$85 billion at the end of 2010.

It is also the reasons why JC Penney (NYSE: JCP) with more than 1,100 stores across the United States and South America offer its online customers the right to return any merchandise they bought online to any of its nearest stores for refund without questions, if the customer does not like the product.

Corporate value system within any organization is a function of leadership. To lead effectively in manners that secure and protect invested capital, corporate heads must be men and women, who understand their markets and customer environments. Understanding markets present some of the most challenging scenarios for those at the top of leadership, especially in emerging free markets, such as Nigeria, where there are limited global best practices.

Traditionally, leading corporations in Nigeria rely on ad hoc crash programs such as management trainings in North America and Europe. These ad hoc training programs because of their distance have limited utility to local situations.

For one thing, a management training program provided at the Harvard Business School, Kellogg, Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, etc. while useful to some extent, may pose practical challenges because majority of the lecturers that are applying settled management theories that may be very functional to the American or English experience to Nigerian and West African experiences, lack an understanding of the Nigerian market environments.

Further, most of the employees sent to these institutions spend more time having fun than assimilating what is provided. In most cases, the scenarios are foreign to the employee students.

To reposition as a customer driven business is to create an opportunity for meaningful global penetration and effective global branding. Apple, Inc. (NASDQ: AAPL) the world’s largest technology company at the end of 2010 with market capitalization of US$305 billion, is a classic example of a corporation that exists to service customer interests. Every product that is manufactured and marketed by Apple is customer driven, i.e. the products are manufactured to meet customer demands. Worthy of note are the sundry corporations that have emerged to service or enhance customer experiences with Apple products.

Leading an institution to reply to the conditions that call for change or to innovate on the institution’s own initiative requires a clear understanding of its corporate culture and how to modify that culture in a desired direction. The most important leadership knowledge that can be gleamed from Steven Jobs, the 55 year old Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Apple is that context assessment in the form of organizational assessment provides the most information regarding organizational culture, and proves to be the most useful tool for institutional transformation.

Today’s Apple is far different from the original Apple that Jobs inherited, when the company almost went bankrupt, due to poor management and poor customer relationships.

Through able leadership that is customer focused, Jobs have shown that institutional leadership, resource allocation, institutional structure, the flow of decision making, and effective ties to external organizations, remain fundamental to the bottom line and creates an unyielding expansion in customer loyalty to the corporate entity. This is fundamentally why Apple, Inc. earns nearly US$16.00 profit per share in a competitive technology gadget manufacturing industry. Even in command economies, customers resent hostile and disrespectful business environments.

Positioning corporations to focus on customer service require a thorough education and preparation for leadership. It also requires a revolution in corporate ideas, especially for publicly traded companies. Trust among the management team is an important part of any attempt at changing the corporate culture.

To develop a trustworthy environment, top management must create open communication down the chain of command. Like a military setting, it is the low level of the command chain that represents the booths on the ground.

They are the ones that have direct contacts with customers and like combat soldiers, they are the life line of the entire battle, the first ones to lay their lives for the common cause, the first to sustain injury, and the first to sense defeat or victory.

Management planning strategies that are open, participatory, and aligned with the corporate culture can help develop institutional innovations and transformational change necessary to reposition the public and customer views of a corporation. Open management planning strategies gives the line employees who are the face of the corporate entity the confidence and trust to engage in their daily routine with the understanding that every decision impacts on the customer, creates a permanent view of the corporation on the customer, and may define the public image of the corporation.

Corporations that adopt teamwork, participation, commitment, and high levels of affiliation, tend to succeed in changing situations more than those characterized by an elite, meritocratic, or leadership value structures. The team work approach encourages or enables line employees to look at change positively and as a collective effort. Everyone in a serious customer driven corporate culture environment, from the CEO to the gate man should have customer relationship training. The very essence of being in business is to serve the customers hence the importance of making sure that everyone who is hired in a corporation must have sufficient contact and understanding of who these customers are.

The responsibility for creating and maintaining a customer service culture lies with executives, managers, and organizational leaders. This is because they have the power and influence to create and impact the culture and they can make the decisions and communicate the values that are essential for excellent customer service.

The mission of all business activities is the bottom line, i.e. unless someone somewhere decides to purchase your product, there is no profit. Every corporation must come to terms that the top line in this business value system require management and those who make decisions on behalf of the corporation to understand that sales people are those who do what they are told to do.

Further, Nigeria is fully a free market system where there are no barriers to entries into any businesses. Even in industries that seem protected, such protections are temporary. An effective management or investment firm can scoop onto any businesses in any industry, where inefficiency has created an opportunity for entry.