FLIGHT DELAYS AND PASSENGERS' COMPENSATION

It is often said that time is money. Indeed, this holds really true because time squandered can never be regained. Sometimes, persons who fail or neglect to keep appointments or be on time for an appointment may thereby miss opportunities of a lifetime. Sometimes, the missed opportunity might not be the fault of that person. It might in fact be the fault of some other third parties who do not think that considerations for their customers/clients should form part of the service they are supposed to render. Let’s go the route of the airlines on this one today.

Airlines usually require passengers to check in for flights booked at least 50 minutes before departure and oftentimes, we have heard stories of passengers missing their flights not necessarily because the plane had taken off before they got to the airport, but because they came in several minutes after they were supposed to have checked in. There have in fact been stories of a particular airline in Nigeria which allows itself to be so over-booked online that sometimes when you turn up at 1 pm for a flight that is supposed to depart at 1.40 pm, you will be told that you have arrived too late!

In such situations, the missed flight and having to make arrangements for another flight are the passenger’s punishments for “late coming”. While the passenger however gets some form of punishment for coming late or even sometimes with an over-booked flight, for not coming early enough, the situation is very different with the airlines when they, for whatever reasons, cancel or delay their flights. We understand that airlines can sometimes be forced by reasons beyond their control such as really bad weather conditions to delay their flights or even totally cancel such flights until further notice. However, even in such situations, airlines owe their customers, the passengers, the duty of promptly informing them of their proposed action and the reason(s) for such actions.

Where however, the reasons for delaying or cancelling a flight has nothing to do with, say, the weather condition, then, it is only fair that the airline compensates the passengers who had booked and paid for such a flight. Compensation should come not just in form of refunding the money already paid where necessary, it should also come in form of paying back more than the passengers paid in an attempt to mitigate whatever inconveniences the delay or cancellation might cause to them.

A responsible airline management, especially in climes where there the business is quite competitive will realise that offering some sort of compensations even without the existence of a law to compel them to do so, will keep the passengers returning to their airline. Of course it cannot be in the interest of any airline to make flight delays and cancellations a habit just because it provides some sort of compensations.

The Air Passengers Bill of Rights currently in the process of being passed in Nigeria while being a step in the right direction, has, in my view not yet adequately addressed the issue of compensation of passengers in the events of delays. For instance, the Bill is said to have provisions that passengers can demand for reimbursement of money paid where flights have been delayed for up to two hours or more. And where the delay is just an hour, the airline should make provisions for two free calls, emails and snacks for affected passengers. While admitting that this is better than nothing, it is nevertheless the case that some people cannot be adequately compensated in monetary terms for even a delay of one hour. It is therefore recommended that the provisions in the Bill should be more stringent and should make it mandatory for airlines to compensate passengers in cases of flights delayed for up to one hour or more and where cancelled, compensation should not just come in form of provision of accommodation and transport to and from the airport. The compensation should be much more than that. It could come in form of perhaps, a 30% discount and refund on the ticket already bought or the passengers’ future tickets. These measures will serve to keep the airlines on their toes and will definitely go a long way to reduce the frequency of flight delays and sometimes outright cancellations in many cases, with scant or non-existent regards for the convenience or situations of the passengers.

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CUSTOMER SERVICE THE RIGHT WAY

I had some issues with a security software I downloaded on my laptop and immediately reported the issues I had through the software company's support mail. To my surprise and delight, I got a response to my mail within an hour of sending the mail and expressing my concerns. The mail suggested steps to take to correct the issues and get the software working well again. In the mail, I was encouraged to never hesitate to get across to the support team if the suggestions did not help my situation.

I tried the steps suggested but still had my issues unresolved and, following their encouragement, promptly sent another mail to report the failure of the suggested steps. Within another few hours, I had received another mail which informed me that another programme installed on my laptop was the cause of the issues I was having and suggesting steps to take to correct the situation. I followed the instructions in the mail and was elated to see the software working again. I immediately reported the success of the new measures to the software company.






It is instructive to note that the software was a free security software I downloaded from my bank's internet banking page. I paid absolutely nothing for this software and yet when I had issues with it, I was given speedy, top-rate customer care attention and further encouraged to always report further issues as the support team was always ready to assist in the resolution of any issue I might have with their software. I have emphasised the free nature of this software to show that this company has nothing to lose if I decided to withdraw my "patronage" because they do not thereby lose any income. It got me thinking again about companies here in Nigeria most of which have either rude or completely clueless customer care representatives. As I have written before in a previous post, I have found that a lot of our companies either have non-functional email addresses or do not bother to check their mails and maybe even worse, they do not deem the bulk of the mails sent to them to complain about products/services worthy of responses.

I have said it before and I will continue to say it until something gives, we, the customers have enormous powers that we refuse or neglect to make use of to get better services, and until we exercise our powers and say enough is enough, even the few companies that have relatively good customer care service will be tempted to join the others. After all, if the customers are not complaining, they must be content with the quality (or lack thereof) of the services they receive. It is after all, again said: If you can't beat them, join them!"

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RIPPING THE CUSTOMERS OFF

I won’t complain. I just won’t come back - Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad

It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier. - Doug Smith

Much of my posts in recent times on this page and on the Facebook page of Customer Care Reports seem to have focused more on the banks (particularly Access Bank Plc) and the mobile network providers. I guess the reason is probably because almost everyone at least in urban areas over the age of fifteen has a mobile phone and most people with paid employment (even in the absence of any real money to save) have at least one bank account. In other words, a lot of us, if not most of us, are affected in one way or the other by activities of the managers of these two industries. For a very long time before I read the complaint sent in to The Punch newspaper by a reader about how the N5,000 (Five thousand Naira) she paid into her savings account dwindled to just over two thousand Naira within a period of few months without her doing any withdrawal, I had wondered why money kept in savings accounts in Banks in Nigeria should reduce over a period of time rather than increase since Banks are even supposed to pay interests on the account. In most parts of the world, Banks are supposed to deduct charges mainly on actual transactions on an account. These transactions can be in form of cheques paid in or withdrawn on the account, it could also be in form of payments for issuance of bank drafts and even for text alerts placed by the customer on an account. I currently maintain accounts in two banks, one of which is Access Bank Plc (which took over the rights and liabilities of Intercontinental Bank Plc, which was the Bank I actually opened my account with). For some time now, I have been receiving text messages on a virtual daily basis from Access Bank Plc. These text messages are not to inform me that money had been paid in or taken out of my account (in fact, during a period when I needed to be informed by text messages on activities on my account, I received no text, I had to go to the bank myself to request for my statement of account, for which I was charged before I could be aware of who paid what into my account). Virtually all the text messages I receive from the bank are to the effect that I can use my Visa card (which I don’t have) to pay for goods and services and on the ATM when I travel abroad, that I can transact online without having to come to the branch, text messages introducing new products and services of the bank to me and so on. Some of these text messages in fact come across to me like advertisements. No doubt, some of these messages are informative. They contain pieces of information a customer might want to have about the products and services offered by his/her bank. What however mars the otherwise (probable) good effects of these messages are the frequency with which the messages are sent. What makes it even worse, was the discovery, upon enquiry at the bank as to who pays for the text messages, that the charges are borne by the customer! While I might indeed not mind paying for information on how to make my account work better for me, I most certainly will be very unwilling to pay for the same information, albeit reworded, over and over again. In the absence of me being daft, I am not sure I want to be sent the same piece of information on a virtual daily basis especially, as I have said earlier, if I am the one paying for the information. Closely related to the frequency with which these messages are sent, is the amount charged for text messages received from our banks. Prior to the Nigerian Communication Commission’s recent directive that text messages should not cost more than four Naira, the tariff for text messages ranged from one naira to fifteen Naira, depending on the mobile network, the package on the phone and the destination of the text message. We all however are aware, that the banks make use of bulk text messages which usually do not cost more than three Naira per text. I guess one does not have to wonder too long where the difference between the five thousand naira the lady mentioned earlier paid into her account, and the just over two thousand naira she met in the account a few months later went. Ugh ugh, you guessed right, it was deducted by her bank to pay for the unsolicited pieces of information they felt she needed to be fed daily. It doesn’t matter that some of those pieces of “information” are more or less advertisements which the bank should be paying heavily for. No thanks to the generally bad services provided by our various mobile networks, I have more than one mobile line. Globacom (Glo) entered the Nigerian market with a lot of promise. The first and the only one of the GSM providers which is indigenous in its ownership, it came and changed the face of mobile telephony for the better. Being the first to introduce per second billing at a time when the two providers already in the market told us it was not possible, helping us to get rid of booster cards through which the other two were ripping off the Nigerian subscribers and entering the market with a price that was considered largely affordable when compared to MTN and Econet (after many metamorphosis, now Airtel), Globacom indeed brought a lot of hope to the Nigerian subscribers. Whether Glo has however been able to live up to expectation is very much doubtful. The complaint about Glo’s quite poor services is a subject for another day. The concern of this piece is the habit of Glo to automatically subscribe its subscribers to all sorts of services without any prompt from the customer/subscriber. And there are all sorts of numbers offering daily text messages on a variety of subjects daily for a monthly or weekly fee. Some of these numbers are 30807, 33188, 4040 and so many others I do not now recall. And so without the subscriber subscribing to any of these services, Glo on its own decides to subscribe the customer to these services and automatically deducts their credit for services they indicated absolutely no interest in. Upon the expiration of the one week or one month subscription, Glo also automatically renews the subscription, again, automatically making deductions from the airtime credit of the subscriber. Usually, with services you subscribe to, once you text the word STOP to the number, your subscription will not be renewed. Not so with the services on Glo. Your texting STOP makes absolutely no difference. What makes things even worse is the fact that there is nobody to complain to. The customer care number of Glo almost never goes through. And sending messages to the customer care unit on Glo website is a pure waste of time and effort; it is never attended to. The result of these automatic subscriptions and renewal is that I have stopped recharging my Glo line. I do not lose anything by this, I after all, have two other lines. Glo is the ultimate loser because by ripping me off through these unwanted subscriptions, it has forced me to decide to stop opening my wallet to it. And just like Access Bank that keep deducting my account in the guise of the unwanted and unasked for information, I will take my account elsewhere. It might not be much, but just consider how many more people may do the same and the consequent loss to the bank. Unlike the Brown & Williamson Tobacco advert which says “I won’t complain, I just won’t come back”. I will complain and shout it to the roof top if need be, and I still won’t come back! Kindly like our Facebook page and let us have your customer service complaints and commendations, you never know, it just might change the face of customer service for the better!

RECORD KEEPING AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You'd be amazed how many companies don't listen to their customers. Ross Perot

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Bill Gates

The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing. John Russell, President, Harley Davidson

I got a call from a Swift Networks employee in the morning of Wednesday the 20th of March 2013. She, like no fewer than 5 of her colleagues who had called me before her asked why there has been no activity on my Swift Networks account in recent months. However, unlike with her colleagues whose queries I responded to immediately, with this lady, I started by apologising that I was going to ask a question of my own before responding to her question and then asked her whether they had a file on each of their customers. When she responded in the affirmative, I asked her how come she was about the sixth person calling me to ask me the same question. If they did have a file on every customer, it makes sense that the file should be updated after any activity on a customer's file and so the reason why I stopped using their internet services should have been written in my file by her colleagues who had called me earlier. She responded by saying the last thing on my file was sometime about two years ago when I called their customer care number to complain about an issue. The focus of the present write-up is not why I stopped using Swift Networks. Its focus is the possible reason why so many consumers are not getting good customer services from their service providers due to inadequate or no record keeping. Like I told the lady who called me on Wednesday, going by the number of people who had called me before her to ask why I stopped using my account with them, she should have seen in my file, the reason why I stopped using Swift Networks and so, if anybody from the company decided to call me, it should not have been to ask why I stopped using their services, but to find out what they could do to get me back as their customer. Swift Networks is of course not the only company guilty of this. I once signed as a referee to someone who was about to open a current account with Guaranty Trust Bank PLC and about four different people called me from the bank to ask whether or not I knew the person, my email address and so on. By the time the last person called, I was tired of answering the same questions when I would have been saved the stress if one of the persons who had called earlier had noted my responses in the appropriate file. Of course, I asked the guy if they were not noting things down in the file and why so many people had to call to ask me the same questions. In the absence of good record keeping, it will indeed be difficult for a business to determine what the customers really want and or need and what their major complaints are and how to improve the services rendered or the products sold. Is it any wonder then that a lot of businesses make "improvements" that are not to the liking of the customers? Another area, closely related to record keeping, which also affects good customer service is in the lack of avenues through which customers can make their feelings known to service providers. For instance, you will think that with the advent of the social media especially in these days when companies whose management know what they are doing are beginning to employ Social Media officers and managers, a lot of service providers will have functional email addresses and be on social media platforms through which they can freely interact with their customers. This is however not the case. At the time I decided I had had it with Swift Networks and while shopping for another internet service provider, I decided to make enquiries about Spectranet. I went to their website and looked at their products and plans. I then sent an email to seek clarifications on some plans. This was no less than 6 months ago. I am still waiting for a response to the email I sent. My mail was surely delivered because I got no failure delivery notification. Worse still, at that time, in my impatience to find out more about their services and plans I called the customer care number I saw on their website and a young lady attended to me. She however knew less about the type of modems offered by the company and internet plans than I did! At that point, I decided that however fast the internet services offered by Spectranet was, it was not for me. I absolutely refuse (where I can help it), to deal with a company with bad customer service. A company that won’t respond to emails and that will put a person that knows next to nothing about the services offered by the company as its customer care person. Has anyone noticed that the bulk of the businesses with presence on the social media platforms are companies into retail which have seized these platforms to display their goods and even offer free deliveries in certain cases? I have longed for a long time to send some ideas (for free mind you!) to some of the manufacturers in Nigeria but I am yet to come across functional email addresses of most of these manufacturing companies. Virtually all the imported cosmetics and cereals I have seen have email addresses and toll-free numbers that customers can send messages to or call in case of any issues. In Nigeria, in 2013, a lot of manufacturers are yet to take advantage of these avenues to interact directly with their customers. As it is certain that these companies will receive favourable feedbacks, so it is also certain that they will receive not-so-favourable feedbacks. What these businesses should learn however is that neither of these categories of feedbacks is bad. The good ones will let the companies know what they are doing right while the bad ones might tell them what they need to do improve their sales/services/products. As it is with countries, so it is with businesses, a company that does not keep record of its customers cannot really learn from the customers and may of course not be able to provide the kind of service that will keep the customers coming back again and again. Virtually every Sunday, I attend a program in 1004, Victoria Island, and after a few weeks of buying newspapers from the same Vendor, I no longer had need to tell the vendor which of the newspapers I want, once the Vendor sees me approaching, he brings out the newspapers I always buy. Because of this, I never buy newspaper from any other Vendor on Sundays unless I have no plan to go to 1004 Estate. Sometimes, customers do not require much more than little things like this to keep returning to a particular place for their services or products. Business people will do well to take the 3 quotes above very serious if they want to keep their customers and even gain new ones.

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PAYING WITHOUT RECEIVING VALUE

Sometime ago in my office, we had to file a law suit against an internet service provider because we were unable to use the internet for the best part of a whole month though we paid in full for that month. It was in the days before Blackberry became a fad in Nigeria. We needed to do research on the internet we were unable to, clients sent urgent mails but we had limited resources outside of our internet service provider to adequately check and respond timeously. We at a point, had to resort to cyber cafes to do some of the heavy online work we needed to do. We had several times before then experienced similar problems which we communicated to our service provider without any real positive result. That particular month was by far the worst so far because our internet did not work for up to a cumulative period of 10 hours during that month. The service provider made no attempt to offer any compensation for all the lost hours and days. We took them to court and resolved never to use them again. This kind of situation plays out with a lot of services we pay for in advance. Once we pay in advance, most service providers care little whether consumers actually get value for the money paid. Especially in circumstances where the competitors also adopt similar attitude because there are not too many of them to pick from and a lot of us consider the cost of starting again with another provider particularly in the case of internet and pay TV. We send text messages, it fails but we are still charged, PHCN doesn't supply power, we are nevertheless still exorbitantly billed (except for those fortunate enough to have the pre-paid meter which they have stopped distributing), the internet will not work, but we still pay...All these continue because we accept them, we shrug and continue, we are silent, we grumble and let everything slide... Imagine a situation where more people take out actions against our service providers or at least complain very loudly but civilly. Have you ever noticed that a lot of companies and businesses do their utmost to avoid customers making a scene? Now, I am not advocating us making scenes, but we could flood the internet, the social media, the newspaper with reports of these lack of value received in spite of money paid and watch if there'll be any change. Sometime ago when there was a problem with Blackberry services, after the resolution of the problem Glo compensated its blackberry subscribers with 3 extra days to replace the lost days. This is the right practice and should be commended. What do you think? Should subscribers, whether to mobile telephone networks, internet or cable TV be made to pay for days lost due to the service provider's fault?

Service wins the Game!

Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.

Tony Allesandra

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Bill Gates Nigerians are celebrating the victory of the Super Eagles after 19 years since the last cup was lifted. Victory yesterday was especially super sweet for the Coach of the Super Eagles, Stephen Keshi who was himself once a player and a captain of the Super Eagles before his retirement as a player, and of course for the players themselves because not many people gave them chance of even moving on to the quarter finals let alone winning the cup. Most people especially just before the match with the Ivoriens had given the game, and probably the cup as well to the star-studded Ivorian side. I remember on twitter after the first game, the very harsh words of disappointment against the team and their handlers. I remember one of my brothers tweeting for Nigerians to be patient with the boys and not to withdraw their support for the boys since in any case, most people still support their European teams even in the face of long years of continuous defeat. However, Stephen Keshi and the boys were determined to change our minds and change the downward slide of Nigeria as a footballing nation by performing much better than in the recent past. The Super Eagles team and their coaches listened to the complaints of Nigerians, they saw and felt our lost confidence and they used the complaints and lost confidence to fuel their passion for the game and the country. The passion to live up to and probably surpass the glories of the past brought the cup back to Nigeria.

In effect, we can say that the Super Eagles and their coaches were like business owners who knew that their most unhappy customers, in this case, the Nigerian people are their greatest source of learning. Our disappointment in their past lack-lustre performances made them look inwards and gave them the ability to draw strengths from their own passion for the game and gave them, and ultimately us, Nigerians the victory that had been elusive for nineteen years! And so, in the end, their desires to render great service to their fatherland by making the country proud again won them the cup. Of course, there is still plenty of room for improvement, but meanwhile, let's savour the very sweet and delicious taste of victory! Keep soaring Super Eagles! And God bless Nigeria!

Quotes of the day

Until the reports start coming in (and beyond of course), I'll try putting up quotes related to customer service or the reasons behind the creation of this blog. Quotes of the day:

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm

- Abraham Lincoln

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so

- Mahatma Gandhi

CUSTOMER (DIS)SERVICE

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there

— Will Rogers

A man without a smiling face must not open a shop

– Chinese Proverb. I believe, because since virtually everybody is a consumer of both products and services, customer service should be a phrase that will hardly require to be defined before its meaning can be understood. I nevertheless will humour those who might want to know one of its formal definitions by borrowing a definition of the term that I saw on Wikipedia. Wikipedia, quoting the definition of TURBAN, Efraim (2002) Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective, and defined it as “a series of activities designed to enhance the value of customer satisfaction - that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer’s expectation.” I will amend the last aspect of the above definition to read “the feeling that a product or service or both the product and the service of selling it has met the customer’s expectation. There is a reason why I tinkered with the definition quoted on Wikipedia; even if it is just a product that you are selling, the very act of negotiation before the actual sale and the mannerisms displayed in the sale also qualify, in my view as customer service. The description of customer service as a system designed to maximise customer satisfaction is thus in my view, quite apt. Every business owner or service provider knows that he/she must have customers to survive and thrive. Every business owner should thus be aware of the importance of making and indeed keeping customers happy and ensure that whenever the customer requires any product or service that he sells or provides, he or his product or service is the first that comes to mind. If this is so, why then do we have, particularly here in Nigeria, such really poor customer service most of the time? I know it is often said that the role of the government in our individual and collective lives are often exaggerated, in this case however, it is my belief that the government has a lot to answer for in the first reason why this happens and the second fault of course lie with our failure as consumers of products and services to realize the enormity of our power and to use that power to make our business owners fall in line by treating us right. The government’s fault is their failure to protect the consumers from exploitation by those they give licences to provide certain services and sell certain products. Government agencies also rather than regulate the way they should happily look the other way once money changes hands. Our fault as consumers as hinted earlier, is our failure to realize that we have the power to make our service providers behave right, it lies in our abdication of our crowns as kings and queens deserving of royal treatments. Of course, this is not to say that we should misuse our power and bad mouth businesses not deserving of such, no. It simply lies in us using the social media which most of us can now access through our phones, to name and as they say, shame. It is in our power to report our experience either with surprisingly (or even customarily good customer service) or with really bad or customarily bad customer service. Most of us complain for instance about the really bad service we have been getting in recent times from our mobile service providers. But really, what has anyone of us done about it? The only thing I know most of us do is to grumble and leave it at that. I don’t know how many people have experienced this, but also in recent times, added to the issue of bad service from our mobile networks is the really horrendous customer care that we now receive. Before my recent experience, the main issue I had with the networks’ customer care was the unreasonably long period they keep me on hold while waiting to speak with a customer care assistant or personnel. I’m guessing the long period of waiting can be attributed to the high number of people who also have complaints to lodge or issues to resolve. When I finally get to speak with the customer care assistant, I usually didn’t have any issue with their manner. They may or may not be able to resolve my issue, but I never had encountered anyone that I could label as rude or saucy. Well, I never did, until sometime towards the end of last year (2012) and when it happened, I was so shocked that it took me several seconds before I could utter a word. And even when I eventually did, the only I managed to say was “well, thanks for being so rude, what great service” or some other words to that effect. I am sure we all encounter varying degrees of bad customer service daily, from the government officials who will see people to attend to but will rather choose to gist with colleagues and or friends with not a care for the fact that those people might also have other pressing engagements to attend to, to the one who will refuse to attend to your file until you are forced to part with some reasonably large amount of money, to the internet service provider who tells regularly that data that should ideally last for a month has been exhausted in three weeks even when you hardly do more than check mails and use Facebook! Like I have observed in responses to the readers’ feedback page of the ever-innovative Punch newspaper, no reasonable business owner likes his/her faults to be publicly exposed. That is the power that I believe can make a difference in the kind of customer service we receive from those whose wealth we contribute to through our patronage of their products and services. This is what has informed my creating this blog. It is for everybody to be able to come to this page and freely report any bad or particularly good customer service that he/she has received. Please feel very free to post comments, so long as what is reported is fact and not fiction or an exaggeration of the true situation. I believe, we can make the difference, but that can only happen if we act, and we name and we shame or we name and commend those who are already doing well to encourage them to do even better. Kindly like the facebook page created just for the purpose www.facebook.com/CustomerServiceReports and please don't forget to visit the page to report your good or bad customer service experience Kindly also spare a moment to take the survey on the blog. Thank you!