Many a time we hear people talking about customer care.  The term is usually mentioned in a scenario were people say that they are providing customer care.  There is a big difference between talking about providing customer care and actually walking the talk.  Let us  start by defining the term ‘customer care’.

According to Wikipedia, customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. According to Turban et al. (2002),

[1] “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

Let us reflect on the definition above for a while, and then dissect it. The following questions might cross your mind:

1) What is a customer?
2) What activities need to be engaged in for one to say that they are conducting ‘customer care’?
3) Customer satisfaction? What is it? How can I enhance it? Are customer’s expectations being met?

Right! Now let us look at Zimbabwe, post 2008, and see if the answers to these questions show whether or not most firms in Zimbabwe care about their customers.

1) What is a customer?

A customer is a person or entity who pays our bills, puts food on our tables at home, gives us money to tithe in church, puts clothes on our backs, puts fuel in our cars and keeps our companies running among various other things. A look at the definition would make a customer the most important person not only to our companies but to us as human beings, on a personal level. The question is, how should such a person be treated?

Such a person should be treated like the most important person in your life (well, something like that).  When you see such a person you should see dollar bills, survival and your dreams coming true.  Truth be told I have done business with quite a number of entities in my relatively short life and I have felt important on very few occasions.  Have the firms that you have done business made you feel important, and if so, how often?

2) What activities need to be engaged in for one to say that they are conducting ‘customer care’?

I will name just a few from the experience I have had in the industry thus far:

  • Research into your customers’ needs and wants
  • Set customer care objectives and goals
  • Create a customer care strategy that is in line with the market segment(s) that a business is targeting. This should be married to the organisation’s overall strategy
  • Conceive and implement tactics and actions that are derived from the strategy
  • Monitor and control the key performance indicators of the whole process

I am of the opinion that a lot of the firms in the country do not conduct these activities because there is no evidence that this is being done. To prove this let me ask you a few questions:

  • Have you ever received consistent pleasant service from a firm over a long period of time?
  • Are there firms which look like they are evolving in terms of customer care?
  • If a new product or service was introduced to compete with the product that you were using, would you stay loyal to the product or service that you are currently using?

If the answers to these questions are no, then customer care was left in the recession.

3) Customer satisfaction? What is it? How can I enhance it? Are customer’s expectations being met?

According to Wikipedia customer satisfaction, a term frequently used in marketing, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectations. Customer satisfaction is defined as “the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services exceeds specified satisfaction goals.”

Now the questions I will ask based on this definition are:

  • Do the products and services you are consuming in Zimbabwe meet, let alone surpass, your expectations?
  • Grab a product that you use as a group (your family, colleagues at work etc) and conduct a mini survey. Ask one question, “Are you satisfied with this product or service?” Take note of the responses.
  • Do most Zimbabwean firms actually know what they are aiming for? As in do they know what it means to satisfy you? If you think they do, ask yourself the three things that they are doing that show that they know what you want.

It seems to me as if customer care was left in the recession. Do you know of any Zimbabwean firm which brought it along after 2008? If so please let me know, then I will go and give their products and services a go if I can.

 

Until next time.

Ruvimbo