By Olufunmilola ‘Funmie’ Aluko I Wednesday, Oct.7
LAGOS, Nigeria – On any ordinary day, in any major city, the same moment plays out thousands of times. A woman calls her mobile network because her line has been barred, leaving her unable to reach her children’s school.
A man rings a hospital switchboard to locate his father’s ward. A small business owner stands at a corporate reception holding an invoice unpaid for four months. A traveller dials an airline hotline at 2:00 a.m. from an unfamiliar airport.
None of these people are calm, and none have reason to be. What happens next depends almost entirely on one person: the agent, operator, or receptionist who answers. If that employee listens intentively, takes ownership, and clearly explains the next steps, the caller leaves with something far more valuable than a quick fix—they leave believing the organisation can be trusted. If not, they leave with a story of frustration they will repeat for years.
Having spent a quarter-century in financial services—building brand and customer experience (CX) strategies, contact centres, and complaints operations—I have come to believe that this single interaction is the entire game. The person on the other end of the line is not a cost to be managed. For the customer in that moment, they are the organisation.
As companies worldwide mark Customer Service Week, many will picture headsets and call queues.
But an organisation’s front line extends far beyond its contact centre. It includes the corporate switchboard operator deciding whether to help or pass a call along until the caller gives up; the receptionist who serves as the face of headquarters; the security officer at the gate; the public agency enquiry clerk; and the admissions nurse.
Many of these employees never see a formal CX strategy, yet to the people they serve, they embody the brand, the culture, and the promise all at once. Any organisation with people answering its phones and doors is in the customer service business, whether it recognises it or not.
This year’s theme, The Extra Mile, is a worthy one. However, the extra mile always begins with the first. Anxious people are not looking for grand gestures; they want to know they can reach a calm, informed human being who can actually help. Reachability, reliability, and human ownership form that essential first mile.
Any organisation that walks it consistently can deliver a grand gesture and be believed. Any organisation that skips it will find its grand gestures ring hollow.
What the Data Tells Us
This perspective is grounded in hard data. Research across the sector points firmly in the same direction:
Human Connection Matters: In PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 86% of consumers rated human interaction as moderately or very important to their brand experience, while 52% had abandoned a brand following a poor service encounter.
Resistance to Over-Automation: A Gartner survey of more than 5,700 customers revealed that 64% would prefer companies not use AI in customer service, citing fears that it makes reaching a real person harder.
Gen Z Prefers Live Support: Even McKinsey’s research notes that 71% of Gen Z respondents—a generation often assumed to prefer pure self-service—view a live call as the fastest, easiest way to resolve complex issues.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, not a single Fortune 500 company will have fully eliminated human customer service. Furthermore, by 2027, half of the organisations that planned to significantly reduce their service workforce through AI will have abandoned those plans. The future is not agentless; it belongs to fewer, better-equipped professionals handling the moments that matter most.
The financial rationale is equally compelling. Bain & Company’s loyalty research demonstrates that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%. Every dropped call and abandoned queue represents a direct drain on that equity.
Closer to home, KPMG’s 2025 West Africa Banking Industry Customer Experience Survey—sampling over 35,000 retail customers, 5,000 SMEs, and 600 corporates—highlights a shifting landscape.
Reliability, security, and digital access are now baseline expectations rather than sources of competitive advantage. A decade ago, the gap between Nigeria’s highest- and lowest-rated retail banks was nearly eight percentage points; today, it is under three. When products and platforms converge, the human element becomes the primary differentiator.
Despite this, a dangerous disconnect persists. PwC reports that nearly 90% of executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years, yet only 40% of consumers agree. Leaders face a constant risk: believing their own dashboards.
A average hold time can look acceptable on a monthly report while feeling interminable to someone stranded at an airport overnight. The metrics organisations grade themselves by are not always the reality customers experience.
Four Operational Choices That Define Service
Closing this gap requires operational discipline rather than slogans. Running a service operation demands tough trade-offs. Four decisions in particular define success:
1. How to Allocate Saved Time
Automation should streamline routine inquiries—checking balances, tracking orders, resetting passwords. But technology carries a critical follow-up question: What do we do with the capacity it frees? Used intentionally, technology clears away administrative noise so trained staff can focus on high-stakes, sensitive conversations. Used carelessly, it becomes a barrier—an endless phone menu or a chatbot without an exit. Leaders, not tools, determine that outcome.
2. What to Measure
Deflection and resolution are fundamentally different metrics. A contact counts as “contained” if a customer simply gives up, but an abandoned caller is often a customer deciding to take their business elsewhere. Leaders should track how many people abandoned their attempt to seek help. Resolution and customer effort—measured from the user’s perspective—reveal what needs fixing far better than isolated satisfaction scores.
3. Where to Invest
Investing in frontline talent is often a difficult case to make during budget cycles, yet emotional intelligence, composure, and problem-solving are rare, high-value skills. Roles traditionally overlooked—such as switchboard operators and receptionists—require rigorous selection, training, and empowerment. Automating easy tasks while underinvesting in the staff who handle complex cases is a recipe for costly failure.
4. Turning Complaints into Systemic Fixes
Logging complaints satisfies compliance, but logging is not learning. The strongest service operations gather insights directly from frontline staff who hear recurring issues first. KPMG’s 2025 research revealed that Resolution remains the lowest-rated CX pillar among Nigerian retail banking customers, driven by delayed resolutions and unclear communication.
In Ghana, researchers captured the issue succinctly: “Apologies are frequent; accountability is not.” Resolving one caller’s problem is basic service; fixing the underlying cause so the next thousand callers never experience it is true customer experience management.
The Stakes in Emerging Markets
These principles carry heightened importance across Africa, where institutional trust is hard-won and quickly lost. For many, a phone call or reception visit is their primary interface with institutions that hold significant influence over their lives—their bank, telecom provider, insurer, or health system.
Encountering silence or indifference erodes confidence in the institution itself.
Furthermore, customers connect through diverse touchpoints—USSD codes, basic feature phones, WhatsApp, regional branch offices, and social media, where a single post can escalate rapidly. Delivering consistent service across all these entry points requires treating every channel with equal priority.
Human agents also play a vital role in security. With financial institutions in Nigeria losing ₦52.26 billion to fraud in 2024 (up from ₦17.67 billion in 2023), and only a third of customers feeling secure in their digital transactions (KPMG), access to a verified human voice provides an essential layer of reassurance against impersonation and scam attempts.
While regulatory frameworks—such as Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA) and guidelines from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)—mandate fair treatment and timely redress, regulatory compliance sets the floor, not the ceiling. True loyalty is earned above that line.
A Challenge for Leaders
Delivering exceptional service requires fewer grand gestures and more execution on the basics:
An agent who listens fully before consulting a script.
A switchboard operator who confirms a transferred caller successfully reaches help.
A receptionist authorized to resolve an issue directly.
A promised call-back delivered on time.
For Customer Service Week, I offer leaders across all sectors a simple challenge:
Remove one barrier that makes your organisation difficult to reach.
Sit with your receptionist or switchboard operator for an hour to observe the challenges callers face.
Read ten customer complaints in full, using the customer’s exact words.
Empower one frontline employee to resolve an issue they previously had to escalate.
Call your primary service line or enter your headquarters as a visitor to experience your organisation firsthand.
As technology continues to advance, it will automate routine inquiries and free us to be more human when it matters most. What technology cannot do is care. Empathy remains a uniquely human capability—and in competitive markets where products and pricing often converge, it remains the most durable advantage available.
The person on the other end of the line is the reason a customer stays. We would do well to build our organisations around them.
About the Author
Olufunmilola “Funmie” Aluko is a customer experience and brand leader with 25 years of experience in financial services. A Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Certified Experience Management Professional (XMP), and Associate Registered Practitioner in Advertising (arpa), she serves on the Africa Regional Council of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and is a member of the American Marketing Association.
Named among the top 20 global CX leaders in 2022, she has built customer service, contact centre, and complaints management operations from the ground up across leading financial institutions.
She currently serves as Chief Brand and Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Experience at Union Bank of Nigeria, overseeing brand strategy, marketing, communications, customer experience, and the Contact Centre. She holds an MBA from Warwick Business School and a BA (Hons) from Lagos State University, and is the author of Lessons from Corporate Nigeria, a LinkedIn series focused on leadership and workplace dynamics.
