Often, what the subscribers complain about are their inability to make calls, drop calls or call diversion. It has been taken for granted that any attempt to get a quick fix is to complain through the codes provided by the service providers. LUCAS AJANAKU reports that instead of addressing subscribers’ pains, call centres have become pain centres.
A science teacher in Prudent Comprehensive College, Egbeda, on the outskirts of Lagos, Mr George Akpan, desperately wanted to call his fiancé who had left him after concluding their wedding arrangements. He had suddenly realised that one of the items on the list his would-be mother-in-law gave to him had been overtaken by spiritual advice of his church marriage counsellor.
So, he picked his mobile phone, dialed his fiance’s number and discovered that the airtime on the phone was not enough to make the call. He promptly ordered for a recharge card from a retailer in his neighbourhood. After several futile attempts at loading, the recharge card vendor suggested that he called the customer care line to get help.
“When I dialled the three-digit number, there was no success at all. After several attempts, there was a response from an answering machine. I dilligently followed the instructions. I needed to speak with a human being and not a machine, so obeyed the instructions until it linked me up with a customer care agent. At that point, I thought my agonies were over only to be asked to hold on and compelled to listen to music. I was kept waiting for more than 30 minutes. My battery got depleted and the phone went off,” he said.
For George, who lives in Itele, a Lagos suburb, to get to the nearest customer care centre of his service provider to address his problem, he would have to commute to Ikeja. If he attempts to do that, he may spend the rest of the day on the road and still fail to meet the customer care attendants in the office and the urgency of his situation made that option not viable enough at that particular point in time. So, he resigned to fate.
A lady who simply identified herself as Esther recalled the bitter experience she got while trying to call the customer care line of her service provider. According to her, the issue she wanted her service providers to attend to was persistent disappearance of network signal on the screen of her mobile phone.
“I noticed that network signal was always appearing and disappearing on my phone. I thought the fault was from my mobile phone, so, I went to get a new one but the problem persisted. So, I was advised to speak to my customer care attendant through the customer care line. I called and after being treated to unsolicited music, a machine answered me and urged me to hold on as all the customer care consultants were busy. After a long wait, the same machine asked me to visit the firm’s website. I was angry and just threw the phone on the chair,” she said.
For Esther, who lives in Ogba, Ikeja, she is gripped with the fear of the crowd she will meet when she eventually decides to visit the customer care centre since the virtual has failed her.
The issue of subscribers getting quick-fix to the enormous challenges they encounter daily as they make use of their mobile phones have been a great challenge.
Ademola Okubule, a subscriber who attended a forum organised by the National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMS) in Lagos, complained that some of the customer care consultants who pick calls are indecent in their responses.
He lamented that calls were rarely picked and when they were ever picked, a shrew picks the call and responds in an unpolished, uncultured manner, regardless of the calibre of the person that was on the line.
But General Manager, Regulatory Affairs, MTN, Oyeronke Oyetunde, who attended the event, said contrary to the insinuation that the attendants were not trained, she said the telco invests heavily on training customer attendants. According to her, rather than the attendants being rude, it is the other way round.
She said a lot of the callers engage in frivolous calls, adding that some would call to say: “I just want to hear your voice.”
Chief Executive Officer, Airtel, Segun Ogunsanya, said the customer has no need visiting any structure to get his/her problem fixed. According to him, at the click of a button, the problems are addressed using the virtual space.
Inadequate customer care centres across the country has continued to be a recurring challenge in the industry. While active telephone lines have grown exponentially, customer service centres to address increasing demands of customers have not been in commensurate numbers.
At the 48th edition of the monthly Telecom Consumer Parliament in Lagos, it was a major issue that took centre stage. Subscribers took turns to recount their ordeal while trying to call customer care lines.
Former Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Ernest Nduwke, who moderated at the session which had fair representation of the operators, was so incensed that he warned the operators to take urgent steps to address the problem.
“”But we cannot continue like this. Something has to be done. I have made several appeals before now to the operators to expand their customer care centres to carry more capacities. That should be taken seriously. We may have to find a way of dealing with any operator that fails to take the issue of customer care centre very serious. That is the truth of the matter. We cannot continue repeating this issue at every forum. Enough is enough,” Ndukwe said.
With a population of over 170 million and a subscriber base that stands at over 120 million, the need to get customer care centres sited in proximity to the subscribers cannot be over-emphasised. This is because daily, subscribers will have one issue or the other that will require the attention of the service providers. But the situation is not so in Nigeria. As a matter of fact, a community that is densely populated as Ipaja, a Lagos suburb, the nearest customer care centres are located in Egbeda, a place where a subscriber will require about N500 to visit. And when you brave the odds to get to some of them, you are assailed by a huge crowd who have one complaint or the other.
President, NATCOMS, Deolu Ogunbanjo, says the situation is worrisome and wants the operators to increase the number of care centres so that succour could come the way of subscribers.
“The ideal situation is that for every 100,000 subscribers, a customer care centre ought to be sited within the customer cluster. But since we are usually far from the ideal situation, let the operators allocate a customer care centre for between every 200,000 and 500,000 subscribers. Lagos State where there are no fewer than 10 million subscribers should have a minimum of 10 customer care centres,” he said.
According to him, though the operators are trying to reduce the pressure on the few available care centres by guiding subscribers through voice prompts to solve some of their challenges, it is not helping the situation.
A sector analyst said some of the operators have hired third party agents to run some of their customer care centres, more still needs to be opened considering the huge profit the operators are making in the country if only that will be a way of appreciating their continued patronage.
“I strongly feel that the NCC needs to do more to get the operators to do the right things in this area of customer care. As a matter of fact, quick response to customers’ complaints should be included in the key performance indicators (KPIs) which form the barometer for imposing sanctions on the operators. May be if that is done, the service providers will expand their scope. I know they are doing that now through business process outsourcing (BPO), they should get their contractors to expand and train customer care agents,” the analyst said.
