Experts advocate technology as better tool to boost customer experience

Facility management experts have advocated the need to deploy emerging innovative technologies as better tool to boost customer experience and improve business relationships.

They argued that finding innovative ways to improve customer relationship was integral to the success of businesses, stating that businesses in Nigeria still face challenges in their approach to customer feedback, especially as the country parades the largest population in Africa.
Executive Director, Eliezer Workplace Management, David Korede, while speaking at a media briefing in Lagos, said customer service in Nigeria, which was the most talked about concept a couple of years ago, led to better customer relationship.

According to him, the dictums that ‘customers are always right’, ‘the customer is king’ and ‘we are in business because of you,’ were very popular, to the extent that the statements were a description of what businesses hoped to achieve in their approach.
He argued that such approach worked for those businesses across all sectors, stating that deviation from the concept by some companies caused bad customer experiences, which emerging innovative technology could help mitigate.
He said: “It is a two edged problem. The first is the problem of data. Some industries still have no data and feedback policy and so have no means of measuring their customers’ satisfaction.

“The second problem is that of implementation. Businesses receive feedback so that they could effect changes and deliver more excellent service to their customers.

“But this is not the case in Nigeria. It seems more like many industries, haven solved the first problem, do not know the way forward, the implementation and changes that need to be effected, so they keep gathering feedbacks yet do nothing with them.
“The manual approach to getting customers’ feedback poses challenges, as studies have shown that if businesses cannot effectively measure customer satisfaction, they soon lose them to competition.”

He explained that the problem with using traditional means to measure customer satisfaction and generate feedback is that the businesses no longer get robust and objective feedback based on several factors and market conditions.
Korede maintained that with technology, businesses have changed and evolved in Nigeria, but customer service approach is yet to efficiently utilise technology in ensuring efficient use of customer feedback.

He, however, recommended the use of technology, research, as well as innovative and creative measures to enable companies to achieve the desired result from data gathered from customer-feedback.

Speaking, Dele Olaniyi, a manager with a Lagos-based consulting firm, shared his experience with a customer service provider to a bank, affirming some challenges that could have been resolved using technology.

He said the bank’s customer care service agent called him to ask of his service experience and what areas of improvement they needed to focus on to serve him better, which he took time to explain, only to get calls weeks later from the bank asking for the same thing.
“Another customer care agent of the bank called weeks later asking the same questions to which I gave the same information because I wanted to give them the benefit of doubt. Perhaps, the information I gave the last time was not imputed into a database.

“By the time I got the third and fourth calls on the same issue, it became very annoying. The question to ask at that point is, “what happened to all the feedbacks I gave before?”

From a recent study, it was observed that Olaniyi’s experience was not different from the experiences ordinary Nigerians encounter on a daily basis.

Ada, an Enugu-based businesswoman complained about inefficiency and the manner in which the company that supplies her goods conducts its customer feedback, saying it was defective.