As Kenyan brands celebrate customer service week, are they catching up with technology

I bet there’s a ton of Kenyans who still have no clue what the so called “customer service week” is all about but do get notifications anyway. It’s more painful to receive a customer service week notification that apparently shows how valuable you are to a certain company that on the other hand has offered terrible services in the year. It’s like saying; thank you for spending on us, we really don’t care how efficient our services are, but we understand we also need you!

I have received several recognitions so far from Safaricom, Zuku, Stabic bank e.t.c, expressing their gratitude on having stuck with them for the previous year. I also understand I’m probably a stranger to these companies except that my contact details are within their databases. But if we carefully look at some of these companies that are supposedly expected to excel on the basis of efficiency in service delivery, they don’t really need to create mega customer service centers to satisfy their customers. Technology is the best area to start with for once, and I comment Safaricom and Zuku for example, having utilized the telegram app to unveil chat-bot based care such as Zuri.

 Areas to explore for efficient Customer care;

It’s amazing just how we’ve come so far as Kenyans in terms of technology, I remember back in day when calling Safaricom customers care was quite an experience with subscribers having to wait for several minutes before speaking to a customer care representative. Who could have thought a day would come when reversing an Mpesa transaction could be initiated with a simple text message or as it is now by just responding back to the Mpesa prompts with any letter?

Most companies in the country have evolved considerably though not enough. On some occasions, we still encounter customer care representatives with attitude who instead of attending to a customer’s query, question them like they’re wrong. Consider calling a call center for example to have an urgent issue resolved only to be told that “systems on our side are working normally and it must be on your side” even without any form of troubleshooting.

Technology has proved to be a solution before and still believe it is. Queries can be tackled through an online self-service system whether via text messages, USSD codes or internet connected devices. Companies can use social media to handle some of these queries promptly or even advice their customer base of an upcoming scheduled maintenance for example. But as we all look forward to a world that is well connected and services delivered in the simplest forms, we must as well appreciate that technology cannot be an answer everything. Our privacy is still just as important and on some occasions, a one on one meeting with a service representative might be ideal.

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