By Kate Henshaw
When you pay for goods, you expect them to be of good quality.When you pay for services, you expect good service in return.

I wrote about a product I purchased a while back and the experience I went through with the after sales service from the store I purchased the product from and I received a call asking why I wrote what I did. I had to tell the caller that I did not have a pleasant experience at all which ended up putting me off the product in question.

The company that owned the product gave me a number and email with which to put my complaints across the next time such occurred. I was pleased at the response and that showed they listened. Hopefully they will include these in their adverts. In Nigeria, people are frustrated at every turn when they do not know where to turn to express their dissatisfaction.

My advice, do not give up. Visit the branch or head office of the company that provided the goods or service and complain. Do not give up and do not be cowered. It is your money after all. You can only be silent if it was a free gift. If you worked hard for every penny spent, you need to enjoy what you paid for.

My washing machine broke down about two months ago and I went back to where it was purchased. My details were taken down and I was told to expect a call from the company to pick it up and ascertain what was wrong with it. I was doubtful though but pleasantly surprised when I received a call to say that someone was on the way to pick up my washing machine. It was taken away and brought back after a few days. It was in good working condition again. They did this because it was still under warranty. No extra charges at all. The washing machine was a Whirlpool brand. A few weeks later, it was affected by the storm that shook Lagos in the month of February.

I called again but this time was told I would have to pay a charge for it to be checked out and repaired which I did not mind at all. True to type, someone appeared the next day and fixed it. Suffice it to say I was really pleased with the response and will definitely be buying more Whirlpool products.

To say that having one mobile phone operating on only one mobile network will be sufficient in Nigeria is a big and blatant lie. You must have at least two mobile phones with two different networks on them just so you could make calls or browse the internet. There is always the problem of connectivity which involves dropped calls; your being told the number you are calling does not exist even though it does and all sorts of inconsistencies. Mind you, you are still charged for these discrepancies which are not your making.

I wonder what the Nigerian Communications Commission is doing about the network problems consumers experience day in, day out. My Airtel line had been out of service since Monday the 12th of March and I did the usual thing of taking out the battery in my phone and also the sim and putting them back but all to no avail. On twitter when I mentioned this, everyone seemed to be experiencing the same thing and so, I felt it was a general problem but I did not receive the usual message that the network would be going through an upgrade hence one would not be able to make calls between certain times. I waited.

I then used a friend’s phone (with an Airtel line) to call their customer service on Wednesday and after all the waiting with some kind of music that I did not care to listen to, I talked to a customer service agent who asked various questions; told me to take out the sim and put it into another Nokia phone which I did not have and finally she said it would be sorted in two hours.

I waited the rest of the day but the network did not come back on. I received a message the next day “Dear valued customer, thank you for contacting Airtel. Your case ID is ANG000029358275. We will notify you once we resolve the issue.” Knowing the practice in Nigeria where one can wait endlessly without a solution to an existing problem, I drove down to their office on Sanusi Fafunwa Street. My face was a mask of coldness as I walked in.

I was greeted with smiles but that did not move me. I told the customer service agent, Bimbo, who attended to me what was wrong and she told me to take out the sim and she put it in another phone. After a few minutes, she turned to me and said that my sim was damaged! I had this look of surprise on my face. How could that be? She went on to explain that the sim was also old (this was my sim from the time the company was ECONET).

She also asked if I swapped sims when I travelled out of the country to which I answered in the affirmative and was then told that this could contribute to the damage of the sim card. To cut a long story short, I received a replacement sim with all my contacts restored at no extra cost. Needless to say, that I left the office a satisfied customer. Actions do speak louder than words.