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.

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.