By Oluwole Dada
this fourth series on competitive advantage for service providers, I would like to focus on what I consider the single most under-leveraged tool in the service industry. It is the structured, deliberate, continuous training of the people who face customers. This training is not a one-day induction or an annual refresher that people sit through to get the certificate. Rather, it is an ongoing investment in the human capability that determines whether every customer interaction builds your brand or quietly erodes it.
I have seen moments when a front-desk employee raises their voice at a customer over a disagreement, or when a bank teller responds to a complaint with impatience and visible irritation, or when a call centre agent cuts a customer off mid-sentence or when a restaurant waiter rolls their eyes at a table request and we trace it to a personality problem. No, I may disagree. I believe it is a training failure, and the accountability sits squarely with leadership.
I have seen managers dismiss above incidents as isolated individual behaviour. They believe it should be dealt with at the level of the individual and move on. That is the wrong diagnosis. When these incidents are consistent, and they usually are, they reveal a systemic gap: the organization has not equipped its people with the emotional tools, the communication skills, or the conflict management frameworks they need to handle the pressure of customer-facing work.
Training Is an Investment with Measurable Return
Many leaders resist training investment in customer-facing staff. They complain of cost. When costs are being considered for cutting, the budget for staff development is often the first line item they cut. However, they are not having a total view of the situation. The Harvard Business Review has published multiple studies documenting the financial return on customer experience investment. Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80% in revenue growth over a five-year period. Every dollar, naira, or shilling you invest in equipping that employee to deliver a superior customer experience generates a return that compounds over the lifetime of every customer relationship.
In contrast, the cost of poor customer service is staggering. NewVoiceMedia estimated that US businesses alone lose over $75 billion annually due to poor customer service with the primary driver being the feeling among customers that they are not cared for. That is not a product failure. That is a people failure. And people failures are, at their root, leadership and training failures. When next you are making the budget decision about what to cut, the training line for your customer-facing team should be the last thing you touch and not the first.
Your restaurant may serve the best meal in the city. Your hotel may have the finest rooms in the state. Your hospital may have the most advanced equipment in the region. However, none of this will matter if the people who deliver the service treat the customers with disdain. The footfall in your space is a daily referendum on whether your customers believe the experience is worth repeating. The single variable with the greatest influence on that referendum is not your location, not your pricing, and not your product quality. It is how your people make your customers feel.
When Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks as CEO in 2008, the company was in serious trouble. Revenue was declining. Customer satisfaction scores had fallen sharply. Starbucks had expanded aggressively but had, in the process, allowed the quality of the in-store experience to deteriorate. Schultz’s first act was to close every Starbucks store in the United States for a single afternoon of retraining. The estimated cost of that closure was $6 million in lost revenue. The message, internally and externally, was unambiguous: the experience our people deliver is not optional. It is the product. Three years later, Starbucks had recovered its growth trajectory and was expanding globally with renewed momentum. The $6 million was, arguably, the best investment the company made that year.
As I conclude, identify the last time a customer-facing member of your team received structured training, not a briefing, or an engagement with her line manager, but deliberate, skills-focused training on how to manage a difficult customer, how to listen actively, how to de-escalate tension, and how to make someone feel genuinely valued. If you cannot remember, the answer is probably too long ago. The assignment is to schedule it quickly. It’s the most direct investment you can make in your competitive position.
The best service businesses in the world are not staffed by exceptionally gifted people but by ordinary people who have been exceptionally well trained.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
