By Oluwole Dada
We started this series with a straightforward argument: the foundation of competitive advantage for any service provider is the quality of what you deliver to the customer. Everything we have examined including people, process, physical environment, training, ambience, digital accessibility, etc. have been, in one form or another, a dimension of that same truth.
It is therefore fitting that we close where we began: Customer service. This is because after all the strategy, all the frameworks, and all the corporate examples, the competitive battlefield always returns to this single, decisive question: what does the customer experience when they engage with you?
The answer to that question is your competitive position. Nothing else comes close. Ensure you give the best quality of your service to your clients. Don’t ignore the feedback from your customers. Take note of their complaints and ensure they are fixed immediately. One of the ways to evaluate how your organization is doing in terms of quality of service delivery is through mystery shopping.
Either you send someone to act as a customer to check how your employees are treating customers or you disguise and do the evaluation yourself. Make calls to your customer service lines and see how the team will respond to you.
Amazon built one of the most sophisticated customer feedback loops in commercial history. It is one where every product return, every delivery complaint, every one-star review feeds directly into operational dashboards that are reviewed at multiple levels of the organization.
Jeff Bezos famously forwarded customer complaint emails directly to the relevant team with a single character: a question mark. No preamble. No instruction. The question mark was sufficient to trigger an entire investigation and response chain. The discipline behind that behaviour where a customer’s bad experience is not being treated as someone else’s problem is a structural competitive advantage.
Do not wait for customers to complain loudly. Build the systems that surface quiet dissatisfaction before it becomes permanent departure. Survey regularly.
Monitor digital platforms. Create channels for feedback that are easy to use. The outcome of these exercises will give you an idea of the experience of your customers. Do not hesitate to make necessary changes immediately the gaps are identified. The failure to do this is not just poor service.
In certain circumstances, it is a threat to the business itself. The irony of businesses with competition is that your competitors are looking for your mistakes and you must not give room for such. If these gaps require capital investments, don’t hesitate to spend the money. You will surely get the returns.
The research on this point is unambiguous. Bain & Company calculated that a 5% increase in customer retention produces profit increases of between 25% and 95%, depending on industry.
Harvard Business Review analysis found that acquiring a new customer costs between five and seven times more than retaining an existing one. When you frame capital investment in customer experience against the above numbers rather than against the raw cost, the commercial logic becomes difficult to argue against. The investment in fixing the gap almost always costs less than the revenue consequence of leaving it open.
Please note that systems fail, people have bad days, circumstances conspire against the best-designed processes, but the question is not whether your organization will ever disappoint a customer. The question is what you do in the moment that you do. The answer, for any organization serious about competitive advantage, is simple: you compensate, you communicate, and you do both proactively without waiting to be asked, without requiring the customer to escalate, without making the aggrieved party work to receive what they are owed.
Some years ago, one of the new airlines in Nigeria cancelled flights and it took them almost a year to refund the customers’ money. That is not the way to keep a business going. When such businesses collapse, there is the tendency for people to blame the macro environment meanwhile, lack of quality customer service killed their business.
Let me close this series with something I want every service provider to note. Your competitors are not primarily beaten by your marketing campaigns, your pricing strategy, your location, or your product range. They are beaten by the consistency of your customer experience. The service provider who delivers quality reliably, responds to feedback decisively, compensates for failures proactively, and treats every customer interaction as a competitive moment. Organizations such as this do not merely retain customers. They build an asset that is genuinely difficult for a competitor to replicate: a reputation. Reputation is the accumulation of the effect of the customer experience at every touch point
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
