Good customer service is the ‘best way to crush competitors’

Ope Wemi-Jones, founder of the Customer Focused Company, says good customer service is the best way to crush your competitors.

Speaking in Lagos during the launch of her “Customer Service Enhancers Tools” Wemi-Jones said her passion for service is reflected in the name of her company.

“The Customer Focused Company is a consulting company and we are focused on helping organisations basically to integrate a culture of service into their corporate strategy. People now are keeping five years strategy, they are planning for 2020, believe me, there is no plan for service anywhere,” she said.

“If there is a plan for it, it is a passing mention of it. There is no deliberate plan to say this year we must do this and that. Rarely would you find that among many organisations. So the role of the Customer Focused Company is basically to help these organisations integrate service culture into their corporate strategy, to make it a way of life and not an event as it has been for long.

“My mission to revolutionalise service dates back to an opportunity I had in my work place and I was given the role to drive customer service, which I didn’t know much about. But in the cause of trying to do my work, I realised that service is actually the best weapon you can have to crush your competition. And unfortunately, it is also one that people don’t pay attention to for reasons I do not know.

“This time of the year people are cutting their budget. If you have a glimpse into corporate organisations budget, you are not going to find a line on customer service.

“People would talk about their financial performance from now till tomorrow, have 100 meetings, they don’t spend half of that time talking about service problems and how they can solve it. And every day you go out, people just treat you anyhow even when you have your money paying for their services.”

On the reason why she set up the company, Wemi-Jones said: “We accept bad service, poor service thrives in silence. When we start to speak up, which is why we created the customer experience reporters, when people start to speak up about their poor service, no matter who you are, when you say I went here their service is bad, you will save the next person from going there and while they are reading about the bad one, they would also see a good one. You will just immediately take a redirection and go to where their service is good.

“When you go abroad, I keep saying to people that if you go to Walmart or go to any shop abroad, you buy something, you try it before you leave the place, you get home and try it and you think you don’t like it, if you take it back, all smiles, they will take it. But guess what happens, when next you are abroad, you go back to those stores. That is how simple service can be. So they never get alienated with the fact that you must have checked it before you left, you are coming back returning it, they take them from you gladly and you keep going back there.

“I think Nigerian organisations can also embrace that. And service is not the stiff thing as we make it to be. It is my relationship with this and that, and it happens every day. So how we handle that relationship has a direct correlation with business growth, employee retention and everything that has to do with the organisation from the employees to customers, everybody are stakeholders and until everybody comes together and this time I am also driving the awareness on the fact that even customers need to behave well when they get to service providers.”