Last week was observed by corporate organizations as customers’ week. The week is used to celebrate customers of any organization.

In the country, apart from some banks that placed advert in the national dailies to acknowledge and express the importance of customers to the success of their business, no other sector did anything to either improve their customer experience or appreciated them.

One expected that telecommunications operators would have used the week to improve or excite their customers, not through promos but through effective customer experience at both call centres and customer care outlets.

The story of pains at call centres of all the operators’ call centres have not changed.

Few weeks back Sola Salako a columnist with Punch newspaper published an article she titled ‘MTN, where is my N3, 000 credit’. That report and MTN response to it exposed the pain that subscribers undergo in the hands of inexperienced call centres attendants.

More so, customer feedback channels provided by operators are not effective, when emails are sent on complaints, it is hardly responded to and call centres lines are so complex that one hardly gets any issue resolved as they are not meant to talk to humans.

The consumers of telecom products and services have many desires expected to be met. They want services available at all times and at every place.

The consumer wants the services to be of a good quality and affordable.

 The consumer wants the operator to respond at all times when he or she needs attention, and to provide explanations whenever anything goes wrong.

The consumer wants to be protected at all times from being taken advantages of by service providers.

Just like consumers of any other services, the consumer of telecom services wants to be well treated.

The important aspect of all this rests on the preparedness of contact call centre attendants saddle with the responsibility of taking care of their customers.

The telecom industry no longer talks only about customer service instead; it is addressing the broader topic of the customer experience, which includes not just the conversation between customer service representatives and customers when something goes wrong, but the full range of customer contact from when a service is ordered to when it is delivered.

Telecommunications operators have two basic ways to attend to subscribers’ complaint on its network.

They establish customer care shops, which are centres designated for solving subscribers complaint that require them to bring either their phone or computer as the case may be in  internet service physically to the shop for the problem to be resolved.

Products of such network operator are also sold at customer care centres. Another way through which complaints of subscribers are addressed by operators is through customer service contact centres. A customer service contact centre is a department in the operations of the network that addresses complaints through voice or email to a toll free line of the network.

Addressing Complaints
Having a functional customer care shop and contact centre is one leg of effort by operators to take care of subscribers, while training and monitoring of those working in these departments are another leg which to many, is the most important in customer service delivery.

A visit to some telecommunications operators’ customer care shops will explain the need for those workings at such centres who act as interface between the company and their subscribers to be well trained both in understanding the services being rendered by the operating company as well as the manner of treating customers. 

Some of the ‘so called’ trained staff at most customer care centres of greater percentage of operators lack the required technical knowledge of some product at offer to talk of solving some problems that are brought to them.

This writer had issues with his data service of one of the Global System for mobile communications  (GSM) operators, he called the customers service centre and the attendant that spoke to him after holding him on for 25 minutes could not resolve the issue but directed him to any customer care centre around his area.

When I got to the customer care shop, behold the problem was resolved through recharging the phone with any amount of airtime above N100.

Another subscriber that spoke to Nigeria CommunicationsWeek, narrated how he was unruly treated at a customer care shop of a telecommunications operator, when he went for a welcome back pack at the shop. 

He was meant to stay two and half hours longer at the shop because he vehemently scolded the attendant at the shop.

 These are few instances of pains that subscribes go through in the hands of unqualified customer care attendants at customer service centers of telecommunications operators.

The most worrisome of the woes of customers of most telecommunications service provider is their inability to resolve issues through their customer contact centres. A dial to most operators’ call centre especially for pre-paid customers will prove how inefficient they are. The Interactive Voice Response system you will be linked to will give you different options including talking to customer representative by dialing 0. When the subscriber dial 0 as requested the system will continue playing an endless music or advert jingle of the operator endless.
In spite of the ongoing competition in call tariff aimed at encouraging subscribers to sign-on to operator’s network, there should be concerted effort by all operators to make customer care service an experience one.