Prince Osuagwu
16 June 2008
column
Lagos — AS the telecom industry and its stakeholders are striving to strike a balance between the quantum growth of telecom in the country and the place of consumers in the whole affair, industry expert and Chairman of Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), Engr.
Gbenga Adebayo, has sounded a note of warning to operators that unless they invest meaningfully on the empowerment of their contact centre agents, they would continue to experience dwindling customer loyalty
Adebayo gave the warning while delivering a paper entitled "Customer Satisfaction: A key to post telecom boom success" at the recently concluded Stakeholders Forum in Lagos, organised by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in conjunction with IT&Telecom Digest Magazine.
He said whilst stakeholders were making efforts to develop and roll our networks to capture a share of the market, little or no effort was being made in the area of consumer complaint resolution. He, however, attributed this lag to the rather late development of Nigeria telecommunications industry, saying this has brought equilibrium in the law of supply against demand, placing customer satisfaction in the back stage.
According to Adebayo, "operators solely focussed on the bottom line of revenues beyond customer satisfaction and not doing the right investment in empowering contact centre agents with the authority to make on-the-spot customer complaint resolution will continue to see an erosion of their client base."
This, he said, was because in a competitive environment, one bad call was the only opening a competitor needed to steal another's customers.
He noted that most often, the only reason consumers even consider making a change was when they had repeatedly had bad customer service experience, adding that in the telecom industry, people ended up acquiring service from another network and these account in part for why many Nigerians carry multiple handsets.
He quoted a reliable survey carried out recently on the industry as saying that almost 25 per cent of all customer callers complained having abandoned services of a company solely based on their experience with the company's customer care representatives.
He said the survey indicated that 76 per cent of customers who had bad service experiences shared it with others. "In today's information-driven society, these unhappy customers can use mass messaging to broadcast their opinions to millions of potential customers in just a few seconds. On the other hand, 94 per cent of callers who had positive customer service interactions said they would retain their service business with the company.
"So, a single bad contact centre experience can have an exponential ripple effect. In fact, in the Nigeria telecom market where every service provider compete against each other for the same customer, a single bad contact centre experience can have an exponential ripple effect.
"Market research has shown that on the average, an unhappy customer will tell 10 people about their experience, and in turn, these 10 people will each tell a further five people, meaning that a total of 50 people will have heard about their bad experience," he added.
For him, although loyalty is more than customer satisfaction, it is also very crucial that operators are armed with the knowledge that customer satisfaction is crucial to building customer loyalty.
"Customer loyalty can be measured solely by asking one question: does your customer recommend your network to his friends and acquaintances? Although it builds upon customer satisfaction, true loyalty, as measured by recommendation, is a much more powerful indicator of a customer's return business. A subscriber who says they would recommend a company is eight times more likely to be a repeat subscriber than one who is merely satisfied." Adebayo advised that while enjoying the boom in the industry, operators should see the success as a new challenge and should take serious look at the state of relationships with customers as a way to derive increased value from these relationships.
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