The Value of Customer Service Skills for Africa

All organizations exist to serve a customer. The customer can be defined within this context as the beneficiary of the organization’s products and services. Citizens are therefore customers to the government. Patients are customers to the hospital. Potential and current buyers are therefore customers to enterprises. Therefore, the primary objective of every organization is to serve the customer. It is therefore very important to know who your customers are and understand whether you are satisfying them or not.

One way to be sure that organizations are able to take care of their customers is for the employees of that organization to know; what good service is, the ways in which they can offer it and how to measure the level of the service they offer.  Good customer experience can be achieved in two ways: first, by the employees treating the customers well and secondly, by the management treating the employees well. One major reason why many organizations in Africa still offer poor service is that they do not create a service culture and they fail to train their teams adequately on understanding and serving the customer.

With this little background, you can, therefore, see that one of the greatest skills for the attainment of the overall objectives of an organization is customer service skills. Because of the benefits of offering great customer service, more and more companies and institutions are beginning to see the value of great customer service and HR teams are now focusing on recruiting employees that have the required attitude and customer-focused skills for both customer-facing roles and non-customer facing roles.

To improve bottom-line revenue and profits, you need to have more loyal customers. To improve customer loyalty, you need to improve customer satisfaction as they interact with your products and services. To improve customer satisfaction, you need to make great experiences as a part of your company’s culture, as well as improve the experience customers have at every contact point they have with your brand. To improve the customer experience at every contact point, all your employees must be equipped with customer service skills and empowered to make decisions that build trust with the customers and warmth in all interactions.

Africa is the land of smiles and friendship, a natural resource for customer service. Africa is rapidly acquiring technologies that were nonexistent 10 years ago. These technologies are empowering customers: giving them more information about the market and greater access to competitors. Today customers want fast, reliable and professional service. They want to feel they are in charge.  This is the age of the customer on the continent, and there could be no better time to be a more customer-focused organization. There could be no better time for every employee to be empowered with customer service skills and drilled on the role they have to play in the overall customer experience strategy of the organization.

By MBINKAR  Kpunsa Fomunyuy