Customer service is a horribly neglected portion of business and government in Kenya, so overlooked that we are still not yet 80 months into the first ever consumer rights law in our republican history.
We are denied refunds that are our right, wait endlessly for basic information or service, deal with faulty deliveries that cost us heavily in secondary bills, and are even, sometimes, asked to be delighted that anything got delivered for our money at all, albeit years later.
Yet shifting to a better environment, where we begin to have choice in our buying, where one bank offers an outstandingly better or more efficient service (faster and error-free!), where one retail chain seamlessly processes faulty items with compensation, or a single taxi app protects our privacy from drivers who call us later to hit on us, is a long journey indeed.
The greatest gap in this is the absence of any rapid legal recourse. Our rights in law are still scant. And which consumer is going to spend three years and endless lawyer’s fees to get a single falsely accounted credit card statement or tenant lock-out corrected?
Our businesses remain largely unconcerned in an environment where abysmal customer service is the norm. In fairness, some have tried, a little.
Phone lines now exist to call our utilities with issues and technical faults – so long as we can try a dozen times and queue for sometimes 40 minutes.
Yet the road that is slowly improving things for us all is to ‘name and shame’, across our social media, on corporate websites, on hash tags, and on specialist complaint websites. And it is the purpose of this column.
In taking up this spot, it was never the aim to beat a personal mission of customer pain, getting instant sorry letters from Jamii Telecom about my false Internet cut off, or faster SWIFT transfers from I&M. The mission was, and is, to provide a platform that is powerful in getting redress for broken systems and shoddy service – and it works.
Of course, there remain some that will never address the gaps. The Central Bank may never move to enforce rapid clearing of cheques and electronic transfers – continuing to allow some process of days, left over from a departed history of manual banking systems and now out of step with most of the rest of the globe’s banking services. It’s not possible to know what the trigger will finally be for a regulatory update.
Attitudes to delivery also still tend towards the defensive and attacking. I recently wrote about the lack of new rural phone connections from the Universal Service Fund, and was hounded as misrepresentative, because shortly the first new phone connections are actually going to happen – seven years onwards.
But the fact that those connections are now set to appear IS a step forwards. And as outraged as government agencies present themselves in being underappreciated for taking half a decade or more to achieve outcomes, there are spots of hope and action in both public and private sector in delivering on our money and for our fees.
I have never yet reported the companies that DO get back and resolve. Jamii Telecom did. Uber almost did, with a rapid response from the head of customer services, but a failure to amend any systems.
Jamii Telecom, indeed, was one of the most impressive corrections yet, with never another error the same, and a genuine effort to change its way of working.
Barclays never responded, and may or not have corrected its faulty VISA card – a software inadequacy apparently.
But, in all, for every consumer skid we suffer, taking up a public platform enables attention and often leads to progress.
So YOU should use it, and write to me, tell me what happened and how it cost you.
And onwards we shall all move, getting better customer service, which matters. Because for every wasted half day for you, a correction for everyone behind you, including you another year, will eventually make the difference between endless hours ground up in unnecessary disputes, and smooth and rapid delivery in-built, with compensation when it fails. Which is a progress worth writing for.
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