By Oluwole Dada
There is a dimension of the service marketing mix that most business leaders underestimate its impact. They rarely give it the rigor it deserves. Today, I would like to turn the lens on something that sits underneath the conversations we have had in previous series. It is how the customer is served: the process. Process is not a back-office concern. It is not the exclusive domain of operations teams and quality assurance units. In a service business, how a customer is served is a marketing instrument. It is the overall quality of the experience your customers have with your organization.
Every organization has a way of serving their customers, but the real question is whether your processes are designed around the customer’s experience or around your own operational convenience. These two are very different and the gap between them is where competitive advantage is either built or eroded.
Enquiry Handling
Every customer journey begins with a question. A potential customer reaches out by phone, email, walking through a door, or by sending a message on a digital platform to find out about your service. What happens in that moment is not merely administrative. It is the first chapter of the story the customer will tell others about you. Many organizations treat enquiry handling as a reception function. Their thinking: answer the phone, take the message, and forward it to the relevant person. That is a process built around the organization’s structure.
A customer-centered enquiry process asks a different question: what does this person need to feel, know, and experience in the next sixty seconds that will make them want to do business with us?
When Guaranty Trust Bank pioneered social media banking in Nigeria, the bank redesigned the enquiry handling process from the ground up, moving it from the physical branch and the call center into digital channels where customers spend their time. Response protocols were built that required acknowledgement within minutes, not hours. The result was an enquiry experience so different from anything the market had previously encountered that it became a competitive differentiator. Customers did not choose GTBank purely for the product. They chose it, in part, because the experience of asking a question was itself impressive.
For the line manager overseeing a customer-facing team, map how a new enquiry enters your unit and track every step it takes before the customer gets a substantive response. Identify the steps that exist before the customer gets a response, redesign every one of them and automate it.
Customer Login and Registration
This is one of the most underestimated friction points in modern service delivery, and it is becoming more significant as more services migrate to digital platforms. How a customer logs in, registers, or onboards onto your service is more of an experience than a technical matter. It is a point where many express frustration or are excited about being on your platform. Every additional step on your platform can put off your customer. It could lead to leaving your platform for a competitors’. Research shows that registration abandonment rates climb sharply with every additional field or step added to an onboarding process.
In Nigeria’s financial services sector, Kuda Bank’s early growth was driven in significant part by a registration process that took under five minutes on a mobile phone. This was at a time when opening a traditional bank account required visiting a branch with multiple documents, filling out physical forms, and waiting for days for verification. Kuda did not have a superior banking product in every dimension. It had a radically superior onboarding process. And in a competitive market, that was enough to attract hundreds of thousands of customers in its first year of operation.
Every service business has a set of steps a new customer must navigate to begin accessing what they came for. Audit yours from the customer’s perspective, not your view and make necessary amendments.
Booking Procedures
Whether you run a hospital, a hotel, a restaurant, a law firm, or a logistics company, the booking procedure is a critical service process moment. It is the point at which a customer’s intention converts into a confirmed transaction or otherwise. If you don’t give your customers a good experience during their booking procedure, you are simply giving opportunities to your competitors. Remove every form of friction at the point of booking your service. I have seen professional service firms where scheduling a first consultation requires navigating a secretary, and several back-and-forth emails for days. All of this is friction. And friction, in a competitive market, drives away your customers.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
