Customer service is supposed to help you resolve whatever issues you may have with a customer and potentially save you time, energy, and money. Unfortunately, customer service is sometimes designed to make you accept a bad product or service so that you don’t end up losing more than you already did.
We have all been there. And it does not matter what the service is, the experience is almost uniform; at the bank, at the telecom office, at the passport office, at the airline counter, at the hospital reception.
You walk in as a paying customer, and you are treated like a beggar asking for free rice at a politician’s rally. You are shuffled around, or worse ignored, insulted, lied to, and made to feel like you should be grateful they even acknowledged your existence.
Businesses have normalised treating paying customers like garbage and I am sick of it. I am concerned about this issue not just as a customer who wants full value for their money but also as an entrepreneur who wants the business ecosystem to be driven by excellence and not just an acceptance of “quality mediocrity”.
The ‘Take It or Leave It’ Mentality: Where Did This Come From?
According to a PwC survey on customer experience, 73% of consumers globally say customer experience is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. If customer experience is so important, why are businesses choosing to ignore it?
We live in a country where businesses seem to be actively punishing you for being their customer. Welcome to the anti-customer economy. To understand why Nigerian customer service is the way it is, you have to understand the psychology behind it. And that psychology is rooted in scarcity and a culture of deference to any semblance of authority.
For decades, Nigeria has operated as a scarcity-driven economy. There were not enough goods, not enough services, not enough infrastructure. When you are the only person selling bread in a village of five thousand hungry people, you do not need to smile or say ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’
That scarcity mindset never left. Even as the economy grew, even as competition entered certain sectors, the fundamental attitude of Nigerian business owners and their staff remained the same. The business believes they are doing you a favour by existing and the customer has simply learned to accept this dynamic as normal.
This mentality pervades every type of business across every sector. From the woman selling tomatoes at Mile 12 who will curse you out for asking for a discount, to the multinational bank that will make you wait three hours to resolve an error they created.
The attitude is the same: take it or leave it. And because Nigerians have been conditioned to take it, businesses have had zero incentive to change.
The Monopoly Effect: Why Competition Alone Cannot Fix This
The standard economic argument is that competition fixes customer service. When customers have choices, businesses that treat them poorly lose them to competitors that treat them better. This is a beautiful theory that works in countries with functional market structures. In Nigeria, it collapses for several reasons.
First, many sectors have oligopolies, not true competition. If there is one industry that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Nigerian customer service, it is telecommunications.
These companies have over 200 million subscribers combined, and they treat every single one of them like disposable waste. The Nigerian Communications Commission publishes subscriber data showing massive numbers, but nobody publishes the millions of hours Nigerians waste every year trying to get basic issues resolved with their network providers.
The telecom sector has four major players, all of whom provide equally terrible customer service. Switching from MTN to Airtel because of bad customer service is like jumping from a frying pan into a different frying pan. The pan is a slightly different colour, but the heat is exactly the same.
Banks? Same thing. There are over twenty commercial banks in Nigeria, and the customer service difference between them ranges from ‘bad’ to ‘slightly less bad.’ There is no bank that has genuinely cracked the code of consistent, excellent customer service across all touchpoints.
Second, switching costs are artificially high. Porting your phone number is a bureaucratic nightmare. Changing banks requires updating direct debits, salary accounts, BVN linkages, and a dozen other things that make the process so painful that most people simply endure the devil they know. These switching costs are not accidental. They are designed to trap customers in relationships they would otherwise leave.
Third, and this is the most important point, competition only drives better service when customers actually punish bad service by leaving. Nigerian customers have been so thoroughly beaten down by decades of terrible treatment that they have developed a form of learned helplessness. They do not expect good service. They do not demand it.
According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Nigerian businesses have not internalized this data because they have never had to.
In an economy where customers do not leave, retention is free. And when retention is free, investing in customer service is seen as an unnecessary cost, not a competitive advantage.
Government Agencies: The Undisputed Champions of Anti-Customer Service
If Nigerian private sector customer service is bad, government agencies are on a different level entirely. The undefeated champions of terrible service delivery. At least with a private business, there is a theoretical possibility that a competitor could emerge and steal their customers. With government agencies, you have no choice.
You cannot get your passport from a private company. You cannot register your business with an alternative CAC. You cannot get your driver’s license from a competitor. They have a monopoly on the services you need. They know it and they behave accordingly.
The Nigeria Immigration Service passport application process is a masterclass in institutional contempt for citizens. You pay online, you book an appointment, you show up on time, and then you discover that ‘appointment’ is a suggestion, not a commitment. You will wait.
You will be shuffled between desks. You will be asked for documents that were not listed in the requirements. You will be told to come back. And when you return, a different officer will tell you that the document you were told to bring is actually not needed, but you need a different one instead.
This is not bureaucracy. This is psychological warfare against citizens. Eventually, you will succumb to the demand or a bribe to ease the process. That was the end game all along. Public service institutions serve themselves and the public is merely the inconvenience they have to tolerate between tea breaks.
At many government offices, you cannot enter without ‘knowing somebody’ or paying an unofficial facilitation fee. Documents get ‘lost’ with suspicious regularity, requiring you to start processes from scratch. The concept of an appointment is decorative at best. Digital platforms are launched with fanfare and abandoned within months, forcing people back to manual processes
Nigerians are forced to engage with these agencies, and they are forced to endure whatever treatment they receive because there is no alternative. This captive-audience dynamic is the purest form of the anti-customer economy. You are not a customer. You are a hostage.
The Training Gap: Nobody Taught Them, Nobody Checked
Here is a question I want you to genuinely consider: how many Nigerian businesses, across all sectors, have a formal, structured, ongoing customer service training programme? Not a one-day orientation where a bored HR person reads from a PowerPoint.
I mean a real programme. With regular sessions. With performance metrics. With consequences for poor service delivery. With mystery shoppers and customer feedback loops and continuous improvement frameworks. My estimate? Less than five percent. And I am being generous.
Most Nigerian businesses hire people for customer-facing roles and then throw them at customers with zero preparation. The staff member brings whatever interpersonal skills they happened to develop growing up, which in a country where aggression is often mistaken for assertiveness, means they bring the exact wrong energy to customer interactions.
The service industry globally is built on a foundation of training. The International Customer Service Association and organisations like it produce frameworks and certifications that businesses worldwide use to build customer service excellence. In Nigeria, these frameworks exist in a theoretical space.
And it is not just about front-line staff. The problem goes all the way to the top. Nigerian business owners and managers often share the same contemptuous attitude towards customers as their staff. Fish rots from the head.
When the CEO does not prioritize customer experience, when the board does not measure customer satisfaction, when the performance review system does not include service delivery metrics, why would any staff member on the front line bother being pleasant? They are not incentivized to care. They are often not even equipped to care.
Social Media Shaming: The Only Weapon That Actually Works
In the absence of functional regulatory bodies, effective competition, and institutional accountability, Nigerians have discovered one tool that actually gets results: public shame. Twitter, now X, has become the unofficial customer service resolution platform for the entire country.
When your bank ignores your complaint for weeks, you take it to Twitter. When your telecom provider steals your data, you take it to Twitter. When an airline cancels your flight and offers no compensation, you take it to Twitter.
And miraculously, the same companies that could not find your complaint in their system for three months will respond within thirty minutes when you tag them in a tweet that is going viral.
This is deeply dysfunctional. It means that the quality of customer service you receive is directly proportional to the size of your social media following. If you have fifty thousand followers, your complaint gets resolved in hours. If you have fifty followers, your complaint gets filed in the trash. This is not customer service. This is reputation management disguised as customer service.
Companies now employ ‘social media response teams’ whose sole job is monitoring brand mentions and putting out fires. The best customer service in Nigeria often comes not from the service department but from the social media team.
Some Nigerians have started offering ‘tweet on your behalf’ services, essentially becoming customer service mercenaries. The disparity between social media response times and official channel response times is staggering, often minutes vs weeks.
But this model is not sustainable, and it is not fair. Not everyone is on social media. Not everyone knows how to craft a compelling thread. Not everyone has the time or energy or even just the will to wage a public campaign just to get a refund for a service that was never delivered.
The Businesses That Got It Right: Proof That It Is Possible
Before you accuse me of being entirely negative, let me acknowledge that there are Nigerian businesses that have figured out customer service. They exist. They are rare, but they exist. And they are worth studying because they prove that the anti-customer economy is not an inevitable law of nature. It is a choice.
Look at what companies like Flutterwave and Paystack did in the fintech space. They entered a market dominated by banks that treated digital payments like an afterthought and built products with customer experience at the centre.
Paystack’s developer documentation became a benchmark not because their technology was light-years ahead, but because they actually bothered to make it easy for customers to use. They responded to support tickets. They built clear, intuitive interfaces.
They treated their users like human beings. And the market rewarded them with explosive growth and eventual acquisition by Stripe. Some restaurants and hospitality businesses have also cracked the code.
Places that have realised that in a market where everyone is terrible at service, being merely decent gives you a massive competitive advantage. You do not need to be world-class. You just need to be noticeably, consistently, reliably not terrible. That bar is so low that anyone who clears it looks like a genius.
The Economics of Good Customer Service: Money on the Table
Here is what drives me insane about the anti-customer economy: it is economically irrational. Nigerian businesses are leaving massive amounts of money on the table by providing terrible customer service.
They think they are saving money by underinvesting in service, but they are actually bleeding revenue through customer churn, negative word of mouth, and missed upselling opportunities.
The data on this is overwhelming and unambiguous. According to Bain & Company research, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. That is not a small margin. That is transformational.
The cost of acquiring a new customer in Nigeria’s competitive or do I say pseudo-competitive sectors is significant. Telecoms spend billions on advertising, promotions, and subsidised handsets to acquire subscribers. Then they treat those subscribers so badly that they churn within eighteen months, forcing the company to spend more billions acquiring replacements.
If they redirected even a fraction of their acquisition budget to retention through better service, they would be more profitable. A satisfied customer in Nigeria tells an average of 3-5 people about a positive experience. A dissatisfied customer tells an average of 15-20 people about a negative experience.
One viral negative experience on social media can cost a company more in brand damage than a decade of customer service investment. You cannot love profit and hate customers. They are the same thing.
Building a Customer-First Business in an Anti-Customer Economy
The point has been made that customer service in our market is extremely poor and that means there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are building customer-centric businesses to dominate the market.
So what would it actually take to build a customer-first business in Nigeria? Not in theory. In practice. On the ground. In this economy. With these people. With these constraints. Here is my framework, built from observation, experience, and conversations with the few Nigerian business owners who have actually figured this out.
- Start with hiring: Stop hiring people for customer-facing roles based solely on their qualifications on paper. Start testing for empathy, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. Your recruitment process should include scenarios, role-plays, and personality assessments that specifically measure customer orientation.
- Invest in training: Invest in training. Not once. Not at orientation. Continuously. Consistently. Build a training calendar that covers de-escalation, active listening, problem resolution, product knowledge, and communication skills. Bring in external trainers. Send your best staff to conferences. Create a library of case studies from your own business showing good and bad service examples. Make training a core part of the job, not an afterthought.
- Measure what matters: You get what you measure. If your performance metrics are purely about transactions processed, that is what your staff will optimise for. Add customer satisfaction scores, resolution times, complaint ratios, and Net Promoter Scores to your performance dashboard. Make these metrics matter in performance reviews, promotions, and bonuses.
- Empower your front line: One of the biggest customer service failures in Nigeria is that front-line staff have zero authority. They cannot make any decision that deviates from the rigid script they have been given. This creates bottlenecks, delays, and frustration. Give your front-line staff the authority to resolve common issues on the spot, within defined parameters. Trust them. And if you cannot trust them, you hired the wrong people.
- Build feedback loops: Create multiple channels for customers to give feedback, and actually act on the feedback. Build a real system. Assign someone to own it. Review feedback weekly. Identify patterns. Fix systemic issues. Close the loop by telling customers what you did with their feedback.
- Lead from the front: The CEO, the MD, the founder needs to be visibly, vocally, consistently obsessed with customer experience. Not just in town halls and memos, in action. Sit in the banking hall. Listen to call centre recordings. Read complaint emails. When the boss cares, everyone cares. When the boss does not care, no amount of training or metrics will change the culture.
These are not revolutionary ideas and they are not prohibitively expensive either. This is Customer Service 101. The fact that it would be revolutionary in Nigeria tells you how far behind we are.
The Anti-Customer Economy Has an Expiry Date
The anti-customer economy has an expiry date. As Nigeria’s economy evolves, as digital platforms increase transparency, as social media continues to amplify consumer voices, as a new generation of business owners who have experienced world-class service abroad returns home with different expectations, things will change.
And in some pockets, they are changing. Slowly. Inconsistently. Unevenly. But changing. I am not naive. I know this will not change overnight. I know the structural incentives that maintain the anti-customer economy are deep and entrenched. But I also know that every empire of mediocrity eventually falls when something better comes along. And something better is coming.
Also, when there is no institutional mechanism to back up genuine concerns, demanding better service is treated as smear campaigns. Organisations like the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) need to be strengthened, funded, and given real teeth to enforce standards.
Until that day comes, I will continue to do what every Nigerian does. I will stand in the queue. I will call the customer care line. I will navigate the bureaucracy. I will write the formal complaint. And when all else fails, I will compose that Twitter thread because in this country, that is the customer service system that actually works.
August 8, 2026
10 minute
Isreal Oyarinde
Why Nigerian Customer Service Is an Oxymoron: The Anti-Customer Economy
Table of Contents
Customer service is supposed to help you resolve whatever issues you may have with a customer and potentially save you time, energy, and money. Unfortunately, customer service is sometimes designed to make you accept a bad product or service so that you don’t end up losing more than you already did.
We have all been there. And it does not matter what the service is, the experience is almost uniform; at the bank, at the telecom office, at the passport office, at the airline counter, at the hospital reception.
You walk in as a paying customer, and you are treated like a beggar asking for free rice at a politician’s rally. You are shuffled around, or worse ignored, insulted, lied to, and made to feel like you should be grateful they even acknowledged your existence.
Businesses have normalised treating paying customers like garbage and I am sick of it. I am concerned about this issue not just as a customer who wants full value for their money but also as an entrepreneur who wants the business ecosystem to be driven by excellence and not just an acceptance of “quality mediocrity”.
The ‘Take It or Leave It’ Mentality: Where Did This Come From?
According to a PwC survey on customer experience, 73% of consumers globally say customer experience is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. If customer experience is so important, why are businesses choosing to ignore it?
We live in a country where businesses seem to be actively punishing you for being their customer. Welcome to the anti-customer economy. To understand why Nigerian customer service is the way it is, you have to understand the psychology behind it. And that psychology is rooted in scarcity and a culture of deference to any semblance of authority.
For decades, Nigeria has operated as a scarcity-driven economy. There were not enough goods, not enough services, not enough infrastructure. When you are the only person selling bread in a village of five thousand hungry people, you do not need to smile or say ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’
That scarcity mindset never left. Even as the economy grew, even as competition entered certain sectors, the fundamental attitude of Nigerian business owners and their staff remained the same. The business believes they are doing you a favour by existing and the customer has simply learned to accept this dynamic as normal.
This mentality pervades every type of business across every sector. From the woman selling tomatoes at Mile 12 who will curse you out for asking for a discount, to the multinational bank that will make you wait three hours to resolve an error they created.
The attitude is the same: take it or leave it. And because Nigerians have been conditioned to take it, businesses have had zero incentive to change.
The Monopoly Effect: Why Competition Alone Cannot Fix This
The standard economic argument is that competition fixes customer service. When customers have choices, businesses that treat them poorly lose them to competitors that treat them better. This is a beautiful theory that works in countries with functional market structures. In Nigeria, it collapses for several reasons.
First, many sectors have oligopolies, not true competition. If there is one industry that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Nigerian customer service, it is telecommunications.
These companies have over 200 million subscribers combined, and they treat every single one of them like disposable waste. The Nigerian Communications Commission publishes subscriber data showing massive numbers, but nobody publishes the millions of hours Nigerians waste every year trying to get basic issues resolved with their network providers.
The telecom sector has four major players, all of whom provide equally terrible customer service. Switching from MTN to Airtel because of bad customer service is like jumping from a frying pan into a different frying pan. The pan is a slightly different colour, but the heat is exactly the same.
Banks? Same thing. There are over twenty commercial banks in Nigeria, and the customer service difference between them ranges from ‘bad’ to ‘slightly less bad.’ There is no bank that has genuinely cracked the code of consistent, excellent customer service across all touchpoints.
Second, switching costs are artificially high. Porting your phone number is a bureaucratic nightmare. Changing banks requires updating direct debits, salary accounts, BVN linkages, and a dozen other things that make the process so painful that most people simply endure the devil they know. These switching costs are not accidental. They are designed to trap customers in relationships they would otherwise leave.
Third, and this is the most important point, competition only drives better service when customers actually punish bad service by leaving. Nigerian customers have been so thoroughly beaten down by decades of terrible treatment that they have developed a form of learned helplessness. They do not expect good service. They do not demand it.
According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Nigerian businesses have not internalized this data because they have never had to.
In an economy where customers do not leave, retention is free. And when retention is free, investing in customer service is seen as an unnecessary cost, not a competitive advantage.
Government Agencies: The Undisputed Champions of Anti-Customer Service
If Nigerian private sector customer service is bad, government agencies are on a different level entirely. The undefeated champions of terrible service delivery. At least with a private business, there is a theoretical possibility that a competitor could emerge and steal their customers. With government agencies, you have no choice.
You cannot get your passport from a private company. You cannot register your business with an alternative CAC. You cannot get your driver’s license from a competitor. They have a monopoly on the services you need. They know it and they behave accordingly.
The Nigeria Immigration Service passport application process is a masterclass in institutional contempt for citizens. You pay online, you book an appointment, you show up on time, and then you discover that ‘appointment’ is a suggestion, not a commitment. You will wait.
You will be shuffled between desks. You will be asked for documents that were not listed in the requirements. You will be told to come back. And when you return, a different officer will tell you that the document you were told to bring is actually not needed, but you need a different one instead.
This is not bureaucracy. This is psychological warfare against citizens. Eventually, you will succumb to the demand or a bribe to ease the process. That was the end game all along. Public service institutions serve themselves and the public is merely the inconvenience they have to tolerate between tea breaks.
At many government offices, you cannot enter without ‘knowing somebody’ or paying an unofficial facilitation fee. Documents get ‘lost’ with suspicious regularity, requiring you to start processes from scratch. The concept of an appointment is decorative at best. Digital platforms are launched with fanfare and abandoned within months, forcing people back to manual processes
Nigerians are forced to engage with these agencies, and they are forced to endure whatever treatment they receive because there is no alternative. This captive-audience dynamic is the purest form of the anti-customer economy. You are not a customer. You are a hostage.
The Training Gap: Nobody Taught Them, Nobody Checked
Here is a question I want you to genuinely consider: how many Nigerian businesses, across all sectors, have a formal, structured, ongoing customer service training programme? Not a one-day orientation where a bored HR person reads from a PowerPoint.
I mean a real programme. With regular sessions. With performance metrics. With consequences for poor service delivery. With mystery shoppers and customer feedback loops and continuous improvement frameworks. My estimate? Less than five percent. And I am being generous.
Most Nigerian businesses hire people for customer-facing roles and then throw them at customers with zero preparation. The staff member brings whatever interpersonal skills they happened to develop growing up, which in a country where aggression is often mistaken for assertiveness, means they bring the exact wrong energy to customer interactions.
The service industry globally is built on a foundation of training. The International Customer Service Association and organisations like it produce frameworks and certifications that businesses worldwide use to build customer service excellence. In Nigeria, these frameworks exist in a theoretical space.
And it is not just about front-line staff. The problem goes all the way to the top. Nigerian business owners and managers often share the same contemptuous attitude towards customers as their staff. Fish rots from the head.
When the CEO does not prioritize customer experience, when the board does not measure customer satisfaction, when the performance review system does not include service delivery metrics, why would any staff member on the front line bother being pleasant? They are not incentivized to care. They are often not even equipped to care.
Social Media Shaming: The Only Weapon That Actually Works
In the absence of functional regulatory bodies, effective competition, and institutional accountability, Nigerians have discovered one tool that actually gets results: public shame. Twitter, now X, has become the unofficial customer service resolution platform for the entire country.
When your bank ignores your complaint for weeks, you take it to Twitter. When your telecom provider steals your data, you take it to Twitter. When an airline cancels your flight and offers no compensation, you take it to Twitter.
And miraculously, the same companies that could not find your complaint in their system for three months will respond within thirty minutes when you tag them in a tweet that is going viral.
This is deeply dysfunctional. It means that the quality of customer service you receive is directly proportional to the size of your social media following. If you have fifty thousand followers, your complaint gets resolved in hours. If you have fifty followers, your complaint gets filed in the trash. This is not customer service. This is reputation management disguised as customer service.
Companies now employ ‘social media response teams’ whose sole job is monitoring brand mentions and putting out fires. The best customer service in Nigeria often comes not from the service department but from the social media team.
Some Nigerians have started offering ‘tweet on your behalf’ services, essentially becoming customer service mercenaries. The disparity between social media response times and official channel response times is staggering, often minutes vs weeks.
But this model is not sustainable, and it is not fair. Not everyone is on social media. Not everyone knows how to craft a compelling thread. Not everyone has the time or energy or even just the will to wage a public campaign just to get a refund for a service that was never delivered.
The Businesses That Got It Right: Proof That It Is Possible
Before you accuse me of being entirely negative, let me acknowledge that there are Nigerian businesses that have figured out customer service. They exist. They are rare, but they exist. And they are worth studying because they prove that the anti-customer economy is not an inevitable law of nature. It is a choice.
Look at what companies like Flutterwave and Paystack did in the fintech space. They entered a market dominated by banks that treated digital payments like an afterthought and built products with customer experience at the centre.
Paystack’s developer documentation became a benchmark not because their technology was light-years ahead, but because they actually bothered to make it easy for customers to use. They responded to support tickets. They built clear, intuitive interfaces.
They treated their users like human beings. And the market rewarded them with explosive growth and eventual acquisition by Stripe. Some restaurants and hospitality businesses have also cracked the code.
Places that have realised that in a market where everyone is terrible at service, being merely decent gives you a massive competitive advantage. You do not need to be world-class. You just need to be noticeably, consistently, reliably not terrible. That bar is so low that anyone who clears it looks like a genius.
The Economics of Good Customer Service: Money on the Table
Here is what drives me insane about the anti-customer economy: it is economically irrational. Nigerian businesses are leaving massive amounts of money on the table by providing terrible customer service.
They think they are saving money by underinvesting in service, but they are actually bleeding revenue through customer churn, negative word of mouth, and missed upselling opportunities.
The data on this is overwhelming and unambiguous. According to Bain & Company research, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. That is not a small margin. That is transformational.
The cost of acquiring a new customer in Nigeria’s competitive or do I say pseudo-competitive sectors is significant. Telecoms spend billions on advertising, promotions, and subsidised handsets to acquire subscribers. Then they treat those subscribers so badly that they churn within eighteen months, forcing the company to spend more billions acquiring replacements.
If they redirected even a fraction of their acquisition budget to retention through better service, they would be more profitable. A satisfied customer in Nigeria tells an average of 3-5 people about a positive experience. A dissatisfied customer tells an average of 15-20 people about a negative experience.
One viral negative experience on social media can cost a company more in brand damage than a decade of customer service investment. You cannot love profit and hate customers. They are the same thing.
Building a Customer-First Business in an Anti-Customer Economy
The point has been made that customer service in our market is extremely poor and that means there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are building customer-centric businesses to dominate the market.
So what would it actually take to build a customer-first business in Nigeria? Not in theory. In practice. On the ground. In this economy. With these people. With these constraints. Here is my framework, built from observation, experience, and conversations with the few Nigerian business owners who have actually figured this out.
These are not revolutionary ideas and they are not prohibitively expensive either. This is Customer Service 101. The fact that it would be revolutionary in Nigeria tells you how far behind we are.
The Anti-Customer Economy Has an Expiry Date
The anti-customer economy has an expiry date. As Nigeria’s economy evolves, as digital platforms increase transparency, as social media continues to amplify consumer voices, as a new generation of business owners who have experienced world-class service abroad returns home with different expectations, things will change.
And in some pockets, they are changing. Slowly. Inconsistently. Unevenly. But changing. I am not naive. I know this will not change overnight. I know the structural incentives that maintain the anti-customer economy are deep and entrenched. But I also know that every empire of mediocrity eventually falls when something better comes along. And something better is coming.
Also, when there is no institutional mechanism to back up genuine concerns, demanding better service is treated as smear campaigns. Organisations like the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) need to be strengthened, funded, and given real teeth to enforce standards.
Until that day comes, I will continue to do what every Nigerian does. I will stand in the queue. I will call the customer care line. I will navigate the bureaucracy. I will write the formal complaint. And when all else fails, I will compose that Twitter thread because in this country, that is the customer service system that actually works.
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October 7, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
Why Customer Service Is the Secret Weapon Most Nigerian Businesses Are Ignoring
Have you ever patronised a business and even though they delivered what was promised in terms of the product or service, you never went back just because of how they made you feel? That is the power of customer service, a secret weapon I believe most businesses, especially in the Nigerian market are underutilising. A good number of people are happy to pay a premium if it means they get a better experience. In a competitive market where margins are thin; differentiation is difficult; and customer loyalty is fragile, customer service is not a ‘nice to have’ —it is the single most powerful competitive advantage a business can develop. Yet most Nigerian business owners treat it as an afterthought, something to worry about after they have sorted out the ‘real’ business issues. Customer service IS the real business issue, and the sooner Nigerian entrepreneurs figure that out, the sooner they will start building businesses that actually last. The big question is, “how do we leverage customer service for business growth?”. Let’s start with defining the problem. The Nigerian Customer Service Problem. It’s Worse Than You Think Consumers more often than not rank customer service as one of the most important factors in their purchasing decisions, yet they consistently rate the quality of customer service they receive as poor to average across virtually every industry —banking, aviation, telecommunications, retail, hospitality, healthcare, transportation. The telecommunications sector is probably the most visible offender and there seems to be a consensus among providers never to treat their customers like kings. In aviation, flight schedules are routinely changed and no reprieve offered to customers who have to spend long hours at the airport waiting for a flight they are not sure would eventually take off. Despite the banking sector being one of the most profitable industries in Nigeria, customer service remains a persistent clog with many customers feeling stuck to their current provider because the competition is not any better. The retail sector, both formal and informal, suffers from the same malaise. Walk into a typical Nigerian establishment and observe the body language of the sales staff —arms folded, phone in hand, chatting with colleagues, barely making eye contact with the customer who has walked in. If you ask a question, you get a one-word answer. If you ask to see a different product, you get an eye-roll. If you haggle on price, you are treated as if you have committed a personal insult. The concept of a return policy is almost alien to most Nigerian businesses. Once they have your money, that transaction is over. Any attempt to return a defective product or request a refund is treated as an act of aggression. This attitude is so pervasive that many Nigerians have simply learned to accept bad customer service as normal, which is exactly the problem. When your customers stay just because the grass is not greener on the other side and not because they feel valued, there is a problem. The Economics of Good Customer Service: Why Good Service Is Good Business You might be wondering, if the average customer has learned to accept bad service as the norm, why should I go the extra mile for my customers in my business? This is where what I call the economics of good service comes in. According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Also, research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company who invented the net promoter score shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Every time a customer walks away from your business because of bad service, you are not just losing that customer’s future purchases, you are also increasing your marketing and acquisition costs because you now have to find a new customer to replace the one you lost. Loyal customers buy more over time, they are less price-sensitive, they cost less to serve because they are familiar with your processes, and they refer new customers to your business through word-of-mouth. In Nigeria, where trust is scarce and word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, the value of a satisfied customer who tells their friends, family, and colleagues about your business cannot be overstated. Think about how you choose restaurants, mechanics, tailors, doctors, and virtually every other service provider. Most times, you simply ask people you trust for recommendations. A single satisfied customer who recommends your business to ten people is worth more than a million-naira advertising campaign, because those ten people come with a built-in trust advantage that no advert can provide. Conversely, the cost of bad customer service is devastating. Research from the historical White House Office of Consumer Affairs studies shows that dissatisfied customers tell 9 to 15 people about a poor experience. In the age of social media, those numbers are exponentially higher. A single negative review on Twitter or Instagram can reach thousands of potential customers within hours. Nigerian social media is particularly brutal when it comes to calling out bad business experiences. Remember those viral posts where someone shares a terrible experience with a business and thousands of people pile on with their own stories? Those threads have destroyed businesses, tanked reputations, and cost companies millions in lost revenue. And the businesses that fare the worst in those situations are the ones that respond poorly —deleting comments, arguing with customers, or going silent altogether. The businesses that survive and even thrive after negative publicity are the ones that respond quickly, take responsibility, fix the problem, and demonstrate genuine commitment to improving. Clearly, there is both a quantitative and qualitative case for making customer service central to your business. What World-Class Customer Service Looks Like If you want to improve your bottomline and build a community of loyal customers, you cannot treat customer service as something reserved for only “luxury” clients. Even a “problematic” client deserves a good experience with your
October 2, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
How to Build Multiple Streams of Income in Nigeria Without Burning Out
I used to wear my constant burnout like a badge of honor. I remember those years I was running myself ragged trying to make money from every angle possible. Working a full-time job during the day, freelancing at night, trying to trade forex in between meetings, running a small side business on weekends, and somehow convincing myself that sleeping three hours a night was a sign of hustle rather than a highway to the hospital. I thought that was what it meant to build multiple streams of income. I thought you had to grind yourself into dust, sacrifice your health, your relationships, your sanity, and your sleep just to have more than one source of revenue coming in. I was wrong. Dead wrong. In my defence, I had merely replicated the model of work around me. Nigeria is a side hustle-driven society and you might look like you aren’t trying enough or worse, foolish, if you do not have multiple things you are doing to make money. I am writing this because I see so many Nigerian professionals making the same mistake I made, confusing activity with productivity, confusing exhaustion with effort, and confusing the number of things they are doing with the quality of income they are generating. In this article, I will try to expose you to a sustainable framework for building multiple income streams. We Should All Be Hustlers We live in a society where the “grind” has premium social value. Even when there is no corresponding financial value, the mere fact that a person is seen to be trying their hands at multiple things is met with a nod of approval. While this is not necessarily a bad thing afterall, a moving man will one day meet his luck, the problem is that we might be overindexing on effort while forgetting to measure outcomes. So, a young professional working a 9-5 while running multiple businesses might be seen as working hard whereas none of the businesses is meeting any critical growth markers. The truth is that building multiple income streams is not just about doing more, it is about doing the right things, in the right order, with the right systems, so that your income grows while your stress levels stay manageable. It is not easy, I will not lie to you about that, but it is absolutely possible, and it does not require you to destroy your health and your relationships in the process. The ability to build multiple income streams matter so much for Nigerian professionals specifically. In most developed countries, a single good salary can provide a comfortable life — mortgage payments, car payments, utilities, food, healthcare, savings, and a vacation once or twice a year. In Nigeria, that calculation simply does not work for the vast majority of people. Even professionals who are considered well-paid by Nigerian standards — doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers — often find that their salary alone cannot keep up with well…anything. For the majority, a single income stream is simply not sufficient for financial stability, let alone financial growth. This is not a character flaw or a failure of ambition, it is a structural reality of living in an economy where inflation consistently outpaces salary growth, where the currency loses value faster than most investments can compensate, and where the social safety net is essentially non-existent. Building multiple income streams is not a luxury in Nigeria, it is a survival strategy. Building Income Streams Sustainably Now, let’s talk strategy. The goal, remember, is not to stop grinding, it is to ensure that we are maximising output and building multiple income streams in a way that doesn’t lead to burnout. The Foundation: Stabilize Before You Diversify The biggest mistake I see Nigerian professionals make when they decide to build multiple income streams is starting too many things at once without having a stable foundation. They hear about someone making money from real estate, someone else killing it with e-commerce, another person doing well with content creation, and they try to do all of it simultaneously while still holding down their day job. Within three months, they are exhausted, none of the ventures are doing well because none of them are getting enough attention, their performance at their main job is suffering because they are distracted, and they end up worse off than when they started — financially, physically, and emotionally. Please do not do this. The first and most important principle of building multiple income streams is to stabilize your primary income before you diversify. Your primary income whether it is a salary, a business, or freelance work is your foundation. Stabilizing your primary income means several things. First, it means making sure you are earning as much as you can from your primary occupation. If you are employed, have you negotiated your salary recently? If you are a freelancer or business owner, are you pricing your services appropriately? Are you serving the right clients or customers? Are there ways to increase your revenue from existing clients before chasing new ones? Second, stabilizing your primary income means building an emergency fund, at least three to six months of living expenses set aside in a place where you can access it quickly but will not be tempted to spend it on non-emergencies. Putting away your emergency fund in a money market fund offers this critical balance. Third, stabilizing your primary income means getting your financial house in order. That is understanding exactly how much you earn, how much you spend, where your money goes, and where the leaks are. Most Nigerian professionals, if they are honest with themselves, are spending money on things that do not align with their priorities, and plugging those leaks can free up significant capital for investment in additional income streams. Understanding What You Are Building: Income Stream Categories Before we get into specific strategies, it is important to understand the different categories of income streams, because not all income streams are created equal, and
August 31, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
Why Nigerian Businesses Must Take Cybersecurity Seriously Before It Is Too Late
Many small and medium-sized businesses in Nigeria think about cybersecurity as something only big corporations and government agencies have to prioritise. In reality, because small businesses form the backbone of Nigeria’s economy and often have weaker defenses, they are the easiest targets for cybercriminals. The scale of the cybersecurity threat facing Nigerian businesses is staggering and growing every day, driven by the rapid digitization of the Nigerian economy, the increasing sophistication of cybercriminals, and the pervasive lack of cybersecurity awareness and investment among Nigerian businesses. Managing cyber risks has become a big part of building a business today. Regardless of the size of your business, you must incorporate cybersecurity strategies that would protect your business from cyberattacks that could lead to financial ruin, reputational damage, or total operational collapse. Common Cyber Threats Targeting Businesses Understanding the threat landscape is the first step towards protecting yourself. Hence, it is important to identify some of the most common threats that businesses face today. Business Email Compromise (BEC) targets people, not technology. By hacking or impersonating legitimate accounts, attackers trick employees into diverting funds or sharing sensitive data. BEC bypasses technical security by exploiting human trust, losses from BEC exceed billions of dollars annually, and Nigeria is both a major source and a major victim of BEC attacks. Ransomware is a rapidly growing threat to businesses. In a ransomware attack, criminals use malware to encrypt a company’s files, databases, and systems, rendering them completely inaccessible, and then demand a ransom payment, usually in cryptocurrency in exchange for the decryption key. Ransoms range from hundreds of thousands to billions of naira, yet paying never guarantees data recovery. Beyond the immediate extortion, the operational downtime often leads to lost revenue, regulatory fines, and long-term reputational damage. Malicious actors flood company servers or websites with overwhelming traffic, causing system crashes and severe service disruptions. The Nigeria Computer Emergency Response Team (ngCERT) warns that a sustained wave of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly threatening Nigeria’s critical digital infrastructure, with both public and private sector organisations under heightened risk. Fraudulent emails, text messages, or websites designed to trick people into revealing passwords, financial information, or other sensitive data is another common entry point for virtually all types of cyber attacks, including BEC and ransomware. Nigerian businesses are particularly vulnerable to phishing because of low levels of cybersecurity awareness among employees, the widespread use of personal email accounts and devices for work purposes, and the general culture of clicking on links and opening attachments without verifying their legitimacy. I have only highlighted the above as they are the most common forms of cyberattacks targeting businesses. There are other examples of cyber attacks targeting businesses such as Supply Chain Attacks, and SQL Injection & Zero-Day Exploit among others. Why Small and Medium Businesses Are the Most Vulnerable There is a dangerous misconception that cybercriminals only target large corporations because that is where the big money is. This could not be further from the truth. Small and medium-sized businesses are disproportionately targeted by cybercriminals precisely because they tend to have weaker security defences, less cybersecurity awareness, and fewer resources for incident response and recovery. A cybercriminal might not be able to steal a billion naira from a single business, but they can steal ten million naira each from a hundred small businesses with a fraction of the effort it would take to breach a major bank or telecom company. According to Kaspersky, 86% of small and medium sized businesses encountered cybersecurity incidents over the past year. The average cost of a cyber attack for a small business is often enough to threaten the viability of the entire enterprise. In the Nigerian context, where most businesses operate with thin profit margins, limited cash reserves, and no cyber insurance, a single significant cyber attack can be an extinction-level event forcing the business to close permanently because it simply cannot absorb the financial loss or recover from the operational disruption. The vulnerability of Nigerian SMEs is compounded by several factors that are specific to the Nigerian business environment. First, most Nigerian SMEs do not have dedicated IT staff, let alone cybersecurity specialists. Technology decisions are often made by the business owner or a generalist office manager who may have basic computer skills but no expertise in cybersecurity. Second, the rapid digitization of Nigerian businesses driven by mobile payments, online banking, e-commerce, cloud computing, and social media marketing has dramatically expanded the attack surface for cybercriminals without a corresponding increase in security awareness and investment. A small business owner who used to operate entirely in cash and paper now has a POS terminal, a mobile banking app, an Instagram business account, a WhatsApp business number, and a cloud-based accounting system, each of which represents a potential entry point for cybercriminals. Third, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture that is prevalent in many small Nigerian businesses creates significant security risks because employees are accessing sensitive business data and systems from personal phones and laptops that may be infected with malware, connected to unsecured public Wi-Fi networks, or shared with family members and friends. The Human Factor: Your Employees Are Your Biggest Security Vulnerability Cybersecurity professionals have a saying: humans are the weakest link in the security chain, and this is especially true in the Nigerian context where cybersecurity awareness and training are virtually non-existent in most organizations. Think about how many times a day your employees click on links in emails without checking where they lead, open attachments from unknown senders, use the same password for their personal email, their bank account, and their work systems, share sensitive business information over WhatsApp without encryption, connect to public Wi-Fi at hotels, airports, and coffee shops while accessing company systems, and leave their laptops unlocked and unattended in public spaces. Each of these behaviours represents a potential security breach waiting to happen, and in an organization with dozens or hundreds of employees all engaging in these risky behaviours simultaneously, it is only