By Oluwole Dada
If you walk into any industry today, you will find a crowd. The market is always full. The noise is loud. And somewhere in the crowd, a service provider is expected to make customers prefer his products to that of the competitors. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing what can genuinely help you carve a niche amidst fierce competition. We must start from the beginning, and the beginning is always about the quality of your service.
Marketing Cannot Save a Bad Product
The truth that most service providers do not want to hear, is that there is no amount of advertising that can compensate for a poor product. The marketing can get people to the door. It cannot make them come back. Pepsi invested over $5 billion globally in marketing between 2010 and 2017, including some of the most high-profile advertising campaigns in consumer goods history. Yet market share continued to erode against Coca-Cola in key categories, not because the marketing was poor, but because consumer preference rooted in taste and product experience kept reasserting itself. Marketing amplified the message. It could not fix the underlying product gap.
Now bring that closer home. If you run a Quick Service Restaurant and your food has lost its taste and I have seen this happen, where operators who started brilliantly began cutting corners on ingredients, on processes, on kitchen supervision. No campaign will save you. Customers will come once on the strength of your advert. They will leave on the strength of your food. And they will never come back.
The reverse is equally true, and far more exciting. Chicken Republic, one of Nigeria’s most successful QSR chains, built its early growth almost entirely on consistency. Before it scaled its marketing, it scaled its kitchen standards. Customers returned not because they were told to, but because the experience matched and often exceeded what they expected. That is competitive advantage. It does not cost you a single naira in advertising spend.
There is a principle in marketing that separates the great from the average: the best brands are built not just by what they say, but by the gap between what they say and what they deliver. Do not overpromise and underdeliver. Doing that is more damaging than most service providers realize. Every time a customer walks away from your business having received less than they were promised, something irreversible happens. Their trust breaks. And trust, in a service business, is the only true currency.
Speed of Response Is a Marketing Strategy
How quickly you respond to an enquiry is not just an operational matter, it is a marketing statement. It tells the customer, in the most direct way possible, how much they matter to you. Think about your own experience as a consumer. You send a message to a business and hear nothing for 48 hours. You make a phone call that goes unanswered. You fill in a web form and receive a generic autoreply that feels like it was written for no one. What do you do? You move on. You find someone who answers. And in a competitive market, the one who answers fastest often wins the business, even if they are not the cheapest option.
Zendesk, one of the world’s leading customer service platforms, published research showing that 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience, and that response time is consistently ranked among the top three factors driving customer satisfaction. This is not theory, but a well documented, measurable behavior. The businesses that treat speed of response as a core operational KPI, and not a nice-to-have consistently outperform those that do not.
If you are a department head reading this, here is a practical question: what is your team’s average response time to an internal or external customer enquiry? Do you even measure it? If you do not measure it, you cannot manage it. And if you cannot manage it, you are losing competitive ground every single day.
The Long Wait Is Costing You More Than You Think
Let me talk about something that makes me deeply uncomfortable. People waiting. Waiting at bank counters. Waiting in hospital queues. Waiting at restaurant tills. Waiting at customer service desks. Waiting for someone to simply acknowledge an email or enquiry. Keeping people waiting is disrespect. It is simply inconvenience. It is a signal received clearly by every person in that queue that their time is worth less than yours. And in a world where customers have more options than ever before, they will draw their own conclusion and act on it.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
