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.

It’s happened almost every single time I’ve used Safaricom roaming, to the point I finally wrote to the top and said it was simply not viable as a ‘service’, at which point I was told my capping limit had been doubled and I would never have the problem again.

So the next time I took a long-leave overseas, a company payment got held up, which left us short on payroll: I was on the phone. A new contract wasn’t going as it should: I was on the phone. And then one of my dogs went off her food and needed a vet, who said she has cancer and needed decisions and payment: again I was on the phone.

Until on the 28th of that month, at a small airport in Sicily in a field with only a coffee bar, with the dog still in pain and the payroll not yet assured, through came Safaricom: we’ve just cut you off. They lied about upping the limit.

And in that moment, I knew I would never, ever, again, rely or even bother with either Safaricom’s roaming, or postpaid.

And that was before it cost 2 times more to use their airtime.

In the end, it’s not about innovating new gadgetry – it’s about the basics.

Does the service do what we rely on it to do? Do the texts get lost? Is the phone signal there?

Do they up the roaming limit when they say they have? Because if it has already cost us endless letdowns, why would we pay more for it?

Same lesson

Indeed, it’s the exact same lesson for all businesses. For last week too we saw results from an internet service provider, with sales down 20 per cent.

Like Safaricom, this company is strong on marketing: bold, vivid and stays in the mind, and has been claiming forever it has faster speeds and a more reliable service.

But we business people visit each other’s offices, work together: we all learn eventually who sells the fastest internet service.

Likewise, did the newspaper reader get the information they needed from the article, and was it right? Does clean water come out of the tap?

As customers, once we spot the mismatch, the over-pricing, the hyped claims, the poor delivery: we mind. And from that moment, we’re already looking for an alternative.

As suppliers, we just must be able to bear the pain of pulling our socks up.

When that complaint comes, we may never rescue that one sale. But in addressing where we failed, we will rescue all the others to come that would have failed for the same reasons.

If we don’t, the endgame is losing customers to a supplier who even steals our marketing slogan.

For slogans can be written in a minute. And how painful is that?

jenny@webaraza.com