The saying that the customer is king in any business also applies to telecommunications business. They number over 95 million and are spread across the vast geographical area of the country, and have become more aware of the usefulness and potentials of ICT products and services.
There are corporate, communal, institutional, individual and many other categories of users of telecom and ICT products and services. Conceptually, the consumer includes the high political office holders, the youths, the entrepreneur, the artisans, the military rank and file, the fishermen in Delta, the Fulani pastoralists on Gembu hills, and the rural women who sell crayfish at Zonkwa market among others.
The consumers of telecom products and services have many expectations 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.
Service providers of all types of technology are investing heavily in this customer experience. A recent survey, conducted by Frost & Sullivan and commissioned by Amdocs, found that two-thirds of service providers are expected to increase their spending on customer service enhancement this year.
And increased investment is what will be required, for many reasons. Chief among them is the reality that, ‘as service providers try to offer more complex services, like they are doing today, customer service requirements increase exponentially. It is easier for customers to get confused, there are more things that can break and it is harder for customers to decipher competitive offers and determine what they want.
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.
Challenges in 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 interfaces 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 lack the required technical knowledge of some product at offer less talk of solving the 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 l 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 condemned the way the attendant at the shop was responding to customer inquiring.  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 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 of 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.