Susan Abayomi
As organisations mark Customer Service Week, the journey towards going the extra mile begins with something more fundamental: ensuring that whenever a customer, caller or visitor needs to speak to a human being, someone is available to respond.
By Olufunmilola “Funmie” Aluko | Customer Experience Leader | Chief Brand and Marketing Officer/Head, Customer Experience, Union Bank of Nigeria
On any given day, in cities around the world, thousands of situations unfold in which people urgently need assistance. A woman may call her telecommunications provider after her line is barred and she can no longer contact her children’s school. A man may contact a hospital switchboard to locate the ward where his father has been admitted. A small business owner may arrive at a corporate reception with an invoice that has remained unpaid for months, while a traveller may call an airline’s customer service line in the early hours from an unfamiliar airport.
These customers are unlikely to be calm, and understandably so. What happens next may depend largely on the person who answers the call, receives the visitor or handles the complaint.
When that person listens carefully, takes ownership of the issue and clearly explains what will happen next, the customer receives more than a solution. They leave with greater confidence that the organisation can be trusted. When that does not happen, the experience can become a lasting negative memory.
After spending 25 years in financial services, much of that time building and leading brand and customer experience programmes, contact centres and complaints operations, as well as working with service leaders across Africa, I have come to regard this moment as fundamental to customer experience in every sector.
The person on the other end of the line is not simply a cost to be managed. At that particular moment, that person represents the organisation itself.
Customer Service Week often brings images of headsets, call centres and customer queues to mind. However, the frontline of an organisation extends far beyond the contact centre. It includes the retail hotline and customer care desk, but also the corporate switchboard operator who determines whether a caller receives assistance or is transferred repeatedly until they give up.
It includes the receptionist who represents the first face of a company headquarters, the security officer at the gate, the employee answering a public agency’s general enquiries line and the nurse working at an admissions desk.
Many of these employees may never be directly involved in customer experience strategy. Yet, to the people they serve, they represent the organisation’s brand, culture and promise.
Any organisation whose people answer phones or receive visitors is, in one way or another, in the customer service business.
This year’s Customer Service Week theme, “The Extra Mile,” is particularly appropriate. But I would argue that the extra mile must begin with the first mile.
People experiencing anxiety or frustration are rarely looking for elaborate gestures. They want to know that someone will be available when they need help and that the person they reach will be calm, knowledgeable and willing to take responsibility.
Reachability, reliability and ownership are the foundations of good service. Organisations that consistently deliver these basics are better positioned to go the extra mile in a way customers will genuinely believe. Those that overlook them may find that even the grandest gestures fail to make an impact.
This is not simply a matter of sentiment. Research from leading organisations in the customer experience field points in the same direction.
PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 86 per cent of consumers consider human interaction moderately or very important to their experience of a brand, while 52 per cent said they had stopped using or buying from a brand following a poor experience with its products or services.
Gartner, in a survey of more than 5,700 customers, found that 64 per cent would prefer companies not to use AI in customer service at all, with their biggest concern being that artificial intelligence could make it more difficult to reach a human being.
McKinsey has also found that 71 per cent of Gen Z respondents, despite often being regarded as a generation more comfortable with digital interactions, consider a live telephone call the quickest and easiest way to reach customer care and explain an issue.
Gartner further predicts that by 2028, no Fortune 500 company will have completely eliminated human customer service. It also projects that by 2027, half of organisations that expected to significantly reduce their customer service workforce because of AI will abandon those plans.
The future, therefore, is unlikely to be completely agentless. Instead, it is likely to involve fewer but better-equipped employees handling the interactions that matter most.
There is also a clear economic argument.
Bain & Company’s foundational loyalty research, led by Frederick Reichheld, found that increasing customer retention rates by just five per cent could increase profits by between 25 and 95 per cent.
Every customer who hangs up without receiving help, or abandons a queue without a resolution, represents a potential loss.
Closer to home, KPMG’s 2025 West Africa Banking Industry Customer Experience Survey, its 19th edition in Nigeria, reached more than 35,000 retail customers, 5,000 SMEs and 600 corporate customers.
The research found that reliability, security and digital access are increasingly viewed as basic requirements rather than competitive advantages. Customers are also comparing their experiences not only with those offered by direct competitors but with the best service they receive across different industries.
A decade ago, the difference between Nigeria’s highest- and lowest-rated retail banks was almost eight percentage points. Today, the gap is below three percentage points.
As products and digital platforms become increasingly similar, customer experience—and particularly the human element of it—becomes an increasingly important area of differentiation.
Another statistic from PwC deserves particular attention. Nearly nine out of 10 executives believe customer loyalty has increased in recent years, while only about four in 10 consumers agree.
For leaders, including myself, this highlights the danger of relying too heavily on internal dashboards.
A waiting time may appear acceptable on a monthly performance report but feel interminable to a customer standing in an unfamiliar airport at 2am. The figures organisations use to assess their performance do not always reflect what customers are actually experiencing.
Closing that gap requires more than slogans. Running an effective service operation involves difficult decisions, often made under pressure. In my experience, four areas are particularly important.
First, organisations must decide how to use the time technology creates.
I have consistently supported investment in AI-enabled contact platforms and believe our industries need more effective technology, not less.
Being able to check an account balance at midnight, track an order within seconds or reset a password without waiting in a queue are examples of technology genuinely improving service.
However, every automation decision should also raise another question: what will the organisation do with the capacity that technology creates?
Used properly, technology removes routine tasks and allows trained employees to concentrate on complex, sensitive or distressing customer interactions. It can also provide an agent with a customer’s history before a call begins, eliminating the frustration of repeatedly explaining the same issue.
But when technology is poorly implemented, it can become a barrier—an endless automated menu, a chatbot without an easy route to a human being or a switchboard that simply keeps ringing.
Technology does not make that decision. Leaders do.
Second, organisations must reconsider what they measure.
There is an understandable temptation to celebrate reduced contact volumes because they appear to represent savings. But contact deflection and actual resolution are not the same thing.
A customer may be counted as having been “contained” simply because they gave up. That customer may then quietly decide to take their business elsewhere.
Leaders should therefore pay close attention not only to how many contacts were avoided, but also to how many customers abandoned their attempts to get help.
Three important questions should also be considered from the customer’s perspective: Was the issue resolved at the first attempt? How much effort did the customer have to make? And would the customer speak positively about the organisation afterwards?
Satisfaction scores tell organisations how they performed. Resolution and customer effort show them what needs to change.
Third, organisations must invest in people as well as technology.
One of the most difficult cases for a service leader to make during budget discussions is the case for investing in people rather than platforms, and I have made that case many times.
The ability to remain calm when dealing with an angry customer, understand the real concern behind a complaint and make a quick and fair decision is a valuable and relatively rare skill.
Such abilities deserve to be selected for, developed and rewarded with the same seriousness given to technology.
This is especially important for roles that organisations often overlook.
Receptionists and switchboard operators are frequently among the least trained and least valued employees in an organisation, despite being its first voice and, in many cases, its first face.
Give these employees the knowledge, authority and respect required to help customers, and they can become some of the organisation’s most powerful brand assets.
An organisation that automates simple tasks while underinvesting in the people responsible for handling difficult situations risks creating more expensive problems in the future.
Fourth, organisations must determine whether complaints end with one customer or lead to broader improvements.
Recording complaints is essential and, in regulated industries, often mandatory. But recording a complaint is not the same as learning from it.
The strongest customer service organisations regularly engage their frontline employees because the people answering calls and receiving visitors often hear about organisational problems before anyone else.
Those insights should be fed back into the organisation to address the root causes of recurring problems.
KPMG’s 2025 research illustrates the consequences of failing to close this gap. Of its Six Pillars of Customer Experience Excellence—Integrity, Resolution, Expectations, Time and Effort, Personalisation and Empathy—Resolution was the lowest-rated pillar among Nigerian retail banking customers for the fifth consecutive year.
Customers cited delays in resolving complaints and unclear communication.
In Ghana, KPMG researchers summarised a similar challenge in the phrase, “Apologies are frequent; accountability is not.”
They linked the problem to frontline teams that lacked the authority, tools or visibility required to resolve issues fully. As a result, empathy sometimes became a substitute for resolution rather than a pathway towards it.
Although this finding comes from the banking sector, it is relevant to virtually every hotline, help desk and reception.
Resolving one customer’s problem is service. Addressing the underlying cause so that the next thousand customers do not encounter the same problem is customer experience.
These principles matter everywhere, but they are particularly important in African markets, where trust in institutions can be difficult to build and easy to lose.
For many people, a phone call or visit to a reception desk may be their main interaction with organisations that have significant influence over their lives—the bank holding their savings, the telecommunications company supporting their livelihood, an insurer, hospital or government office.
When a person reaches out for help and encounters silence, the consequences can extend beyond the immediate inconvenience. It can reinforce the belief that institutions were never designed to serve people like them.
Customers also rarely rely on a single polished service channel.
They may use USSD codes on basic mobile phones, WhatsApp, physical offices in locations with poor network coverage, a relative’s phone or social media, where a complaint posted in the morning can become a national discussion by lunchtime.
Providing consistent service across all these channels is considerably more difficult than managing any one channel individually.
It is, however, the real test of a modern service operation in Africa. The organisations that succeed are those that treat every customer access point as the front door.
There is another reason the human voice remains important: fraud.
Fraudsters increasingly exploit uncertainty by impersonating trusted organisations. KPMG reports that Nigerian financial institutions lost ₦52.26 billion to fraud in 2024, compared with ₦17.67 billion the previous year. The research also found that only one-third of customers feel very secure about the way their digital transactions are handled.
A genuine and accessible employee can provide an important layer of protection by helping customers establish what is legitimate and what is not.
Being reachable is therefore not simply good customer service. It can also contribute to customer safety.
Regulation already recognises many of these principles.
In Nigeria, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act establishes consumer rights, including the right to redress. Sector regulators, including the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigerian Communications Commission, have established complaints frameworks built around straightforward principles: treat customers fairly, provide accurate information and resolve complaints properly and within a reasonable timeframe.
I take these requirements seriously. However, I also believe they should represent a minimum standard rather than the ultimate goal.
Fair treatment and timely redress are the least an organisation owes the public. Customer loyalty is earned by what an organisation does beyond that minimum.
So, what does going above and beyond actually look like?
It may be simpler than people imagine and, unfortunately, more than many organisations currently deliver.
It is an agent who listens to the entire problem before reaching for a script. It is a switchboard operator who connects a caller with someone capable of helping and confirms that the connection has worked.
It is a receptionist who has the authority to resolve a problem instead of merely redirecting the customer. It is a promised callback that actually happens. It is an apology that sounds genuinely human.
Very little of this is expensive, and much of it cannot be fully automated because the customer is ultimately asking one fundamental question: Does someone genuinely care enough to take ownership of my problem?
This Customer Service Week, I would therefore offer leaders across every sector a simple challenge.
Remove one thing that makes your organisation difficult to reach.
Spend an hour alongside your receptionist or switchboard operator and ask which callers they find most difficult to assist and why.
Read 10 complaints in full, using the customers’ own words rather than relying solely on summaries.
Give one frontline employee the authority to resolve an issue that currently requires escalation.
Then call your organisation’s main telephone number or walk through its front door as a visitor would and experience the organisation from the customer’s perspective.
I am taking up that challenge myself.
Listen to the person on the other end of the line from both sides and ask whether the story told by your dashboards is the same story being experienced by your customers.
Technology will continue to improve, and I will continue to welcome it. It will answer more routine questions faster and, if used properly, give organisations more opportunity to be human when it matters most.
But technology cannot care.
Caring remains fundamentally human, and in markets where competitors increasingly offer similar products at similar prices, that human connection may prove to be one of the most sustainable competitive advantages available.
The person on the other end of the line may be the reason a customer decides to stay.
Organisations would do well to build their customer service strategies around that reality.
About the Author
Olufunmilola “Funmie” Aluko is a customer experience and brand leader with 25 years of experience in financial services. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Certified Experience Management Professional (XMP) and Associate Registered Practitioner in Advertising (arpa).
She serves on the Africa Regional Council of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), is a member of the American Marketing Association and was named among the top 20 global CX leaders in 2022.
Across senior roles at leading banks, she has established customer service, contact centre and complaints management operations, while institutionalising governance around complaint management, service standards and Voice of the Customer programmes.
She has also led award-winning corporate brand campaigns and helped revitalise legacy institutional brands to compete in a digital-first environment. Her work focuses on the connection between brand promise and service delivery, and she maintains that the two cannot be managed separately.
She is Chief Brand and Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Experience at Union Bank of Nigeria, where she leads the Bank’s brand, marketing, communications and customer experience agenda and oversees the Contact Centre.
She holds an MBA from Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and a BA (Hons) from Lagos State University. She is also the voice behind Lessons from Corporate Nigeria, her LinkedIn series featuring candid reflections on leadership, workplace dynamics and the realities of building a career in corporate Nigeria.
