Customer Service: Where Business in Africa Often Breaks Down

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who does a lot of business in Africa. He mentioned one of the things he hates most about doing anything here is the lack of customer service he experiences as a client of many African businesses both large and small. I hate the term customer service because it often makes people think of uber-globalized corporations that have draconian ideas about how their staff have to treat customers or in other scenarios how bitchy American tourists demand to be treated on cruises. What I mean by customer service is the basic ideology of respecting your customers and treating their time like it’s valuable. This concept is what drives business the world over. If you’re in Japan and you’re late for a meeting, you might just spend the next two weeks trying to make it up to the company. In Germany time, respect, efficiency and money are just as important to the business world as in America or Britain. It’s not an ‘American’ thing (as I’ve heard many people accuse) it’s a business thing. It’s simple, when time equals money then literally everything has a value.

What causes this? Well for one there’s some cultural truth to what my friends biggest complaint was. In Africa, for many, time is very much still a relative concept. I’ve literally waited for an hour for a special hire taxi after being told he was “five minutes away”. This is not the exception, it’s an everyday occurrence! Going out to dinner here can either be a delight or a nightmare. In some places it can take as long as thirty minutes to even order and just as long or longer to ask for the bill!

The service industry here tends to not respond to promptness unless it’s forced upon them by management. That might be just fine if you’re tourist here to enjoy a few days of safari and you want to experience the local culture. In that scenario time becomes somewhat relative to you too, and you don’t care as much. For the business class this isn’t possible. For businesses to grow there needs to be structure and punctuality. There also needs to be a high sense of accountability.

I’ve often noticed that somehow it because ‘my fault’ when I ask a server for a bill because I’m late somewhere and I need to leave. If I call a special hire and they’re late, I have no problem calling back and canceling. Yet, somehow it’s become ‘my fault’ for inconveniencing the driver who had to come from across town. The concept of valuing the person who’s paying you for your service is often a foreign thing. Just last week I ordered internet service from MTN, a local provider, who repeatedly had their employees lie to me about what to expect, when to expect it and how long it would take to get done. Some will argue that businesses like cable companies are the same the world over… Never on time, offering inaccurate and unreasonable assessments of their own abilities. Fair enough but failing to meet demand and simply not even attempting to are two different scenarios.

It took MTN exactly two weeks to get me a working connection, twelve days after I paid for something I was told I’d have in five. All I wanted was to be told when I could expect service. If they had told me three weeks from Day One then their arrival early would have been a pleasant surprise instead of the trainwreck it became. Calling to ask about the progress was like beating my head against a wall, everyone told me it would be done that day even after I assured them I had no problem waiting, I just needed to know what to expect so that I didn’t waist time sitting around waiting for nothing to happen.

Now, this very well may be an isolated incident but it points at a bigger problem that threatens business here. If there’s no expectations of time and no accountability for disappointment, there will often be a lack of concern over any workplace situation.

Whether this means anything to Africans or not is irrelevant, these are conditions that the rest of the world business community has little patience for. So before a good portion of the world engages African businesses I suspect this will have to change.