Dear companies, it costs little to confront and rectify mistakes

The gap between the promise and delivery is what makes a company tick.

Mistakes are incredibly painful things, so painful for many of us we carry on making them rather than confront the stark reality that we must improve.

Yet, what a price we pay for this minor piece of self-protection.

For, in every way, it stops us from learning, where the only businesses that survive today’s pace of change are learning all the time.

Management theorists call these survivors, adaptive businesses: they constantly change what they are doing in order to thrive and grow.

But that isn’t just some pretty thing that we airily call innovation.

It also rests heavily on addressing those painful customer complaints, so as to get the basics right.

For sure, I feel sad to take Safaricom as our close-to-home example bearing in mind its current travails, but it made itself such an easy target for our switching to an alternative service.

Because the things that it got wrong, it kept getting wrong.

As a case in point, I take its postpaid service, and specifically its international roaming.

Postpaid accounts

Safaricom only offers roaming (or did in 2008) on postpaid accounts, which actually aren’t postpaid at all, but mammoth prepaids.

Customers put down a huge deposit that Safaricom holds forever, and tops-up with a monthly statement requiring payment for last month’s use – nice little earner!

However, roaming is really, really expensive, and currently it’s possible to spend a LOT.

So what Safaricom does is cut you off when you hit the deposit level, even if you only paid your last bill two weeks ago.