The Person on the Other End of the Line
This Customer Service Week, the extra mile starts with something simpler: making sure that when a customer, caller, or visitor needs a human being, one is there.
By Olufunmilola ‘Funmie’ Aluko | Customer Experience Leader | Chief Brand and Marketing Officer/ Head, Customer Experience, Union Bank of Nigeria
On any ordinary day, in any large city, the same moment plays out thousands of times. A woman calls her mobile network because her line has been barred and she cannot reach her children’s school. A man rings a hospital switchboard, trying to find out which ward his father has been taken to. A small business owner stands at the reception desk of a large company, holding an invoice that has been unpaid for four months. A traveller dials an airline hotline at two in the morning from an airport she does not know.
None of them is calm, and none of them has reason to be. What happens next depends almost entirely on one person: the agent, operator, or receptionist who answers. If that person hears the whole problem, takes ownership of it and explains plainly what will happen next, the caller leaves with something more valuable than a resolution. She leaves believing the organisation can be trusted. If not, she leaves with a story she will tell for years.
I have spent a quarter of a century in financial services, much of it building and leading brand and customer experience programmes, contact centres and complaints operations, and working with service leaders across the continent. I have come to believe that this moment is the whole game, in every sector. The person on the other end of the line is not a cost to be managed. For the customer in that moment, she is the organisation.
This week, organisations around the world mark Customer Service Week, and most of us will picture headsets and call queues. But the front line of any organisation is far wider than its contact centre. It is the retail hotline and the customer care desk, certainly. It is also the corporate switchboard that decides whether a caller is helped or passed from extension to extension until she gives up; the receptionist who is the first face of a headquarters; the security officer at the gate; the person who answers the general enquiries line of a public agency; the nurse at the admissions desk. Many of these people never see the inside of a customer experience strategy. Yet to the people they serve, they are the brand, the culture and the promise, all at once. Any organisation with people answering its phones and its doors is in the customer service business, whether it thinks of itself that way or not.
This year’s theme is The Extra Mile, and it is a good one. I would add only that the extra mile begins with the first. Anxious people are not looking for grand gestures. They want to know that they can reach someone when it matters, and that the person they reach is calm, informed and able to help. Reachability, reliability and a human being who takes ownership: that is the first mile. Any organisation that walks it consistently can go the extra mile and be believed. Any organisation that skips it will find that the grand gesture rings hollow.
None of this is sentiment. The most rigorous research houses in our field have measured it, and their findings point firmly in the same direction.
In PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 86 per cent of consumers said human interaction is moderately or very important to their experience of a brand, and 52 per cent had stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience with its products or services. Gartner, surveying more than 5,700 customers, found that 64 per cent would prefer companies did not use AI in customer service at all, and that their single biggest concern was that AI would make it harder to reach a person. Even McKinsey, whose work has done much to chart the rise of AI in customer care, found that 71 per cent of Gen Z respondents, the generation we assume would rather never speak to anyone, see a live call as the quickest and easiest way to reach customer care and explain their issue.
Gartner also offers the clearest view of where this is heading. It predicts that by 2028, not one Fortune 500 company will have fully eliminated human customer service, and that by 2027 half of the organisations that expected to significantly reduce their service workforce because of AI will have dropped those plans. The future, in other words, is not agentless. It is a future in which fewer, better-equipped people handle the moments that matter most.
Then there are the economics. Bain & Company’s foundational loyalty research, led by Frederick Reichheld, showed that increasing customer retention rates by just 5 per cent can increase profits by between 25 and 95 per cent. Every caller who hangs up, and every customer who abandons a queue, is a small withdrawal from that account.
Closer to home, KPMG’s 2025 West Africa Banking Industry Customer Experience Survey, its nineteenth edition in Nigeria and drawn from more than 35,000 retail customers, 5,000 SMEs and 600 corporates, tells the same story from another angle.
Reliability, security and digital access are now treated as minimum requirements rather than sources of advantage, and customers increasingly benchmark their experiences not only against direct competitors but against the best service they receive in any industry.
A decade ago, the gap between Nigeria’s highest- and lowest-rated retail banks was nearly eight percentage points; today it is under three. When products and platforms converge, the experience, and above all the human part of it, is what is left to compete on.
The statistic I keep closest, though, is another from PwC. Nearly nine in ten executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years. Only about four in ten consumers say the same. I keep it close because it describes a risk every leader carries, myself included: the risk of believing our own dashboards. A waiting time can look perfectly respectable on a monthly report and still feel endless to someone standing in an airport at two in the morning. The numbers we grade ourselves by are not always the numbers our customers are living. Closing that gap is not a matter of slogans. Writing about service from a distance is easy; running a service operation means making choices, often under pressure. In my experience, four of them decide almost everything.
The first is what we do with the time technology gives back. I have championed investment in AI-enabled contact platforms, and I want more good technology across our industries, not less. A balance checked at midnight, an order tracked in seconds, a password reset without a queue: these are genuinely good service. But every automation decision carries a quieter question: what will we do with the capacity it frees? Used well, technology clears away the routine and lets trained people focus on conversations that are complicated, sensitive, or frightening. It puts the customer’s history on the agent’s screen before the call connects, so nobody has to repeat herself four times. Used carelessly, the same tool becomes a wall: an endless phone menu, a chatbot with no exit, a switchboard that rings out. The technology does not make that choice. Leaders do.
The second is what we choose to measure, and here I will be candid about the temptation. Contained and deflected contacts look like savings, and it is easy to celebrate them. But deflection and resolution are different things. A contact can count as “contained” simply because the customer gave up, and a customer who gives up is usually deciding, quietly, where to take her business next. The number every leader should watch most closely is not how many contacts were avoided but how many people abandoned their attempt to reach us, because every one of them needed us and did not find us. Alongside it sit three questions that the customer answers rather than the organisation: was the matter resolved on the first attempt, how much effort did it take, and would she speak well of us afterwards? Satisfaction scores tell us how we did. Resolution and effort tell us what to fix.
The third is where the investment goes. The hardest case any service leader makes at budget time is for people rather than platforms, and I have made it many times.
The ability to stay steady while someone is furious, to hear the real worry beneath a complaint, and to decide quickly and fairly is a genuine and fairly rare skill. It deserves to be selected for, developed and rewarded as seriously as any software. This applies with particular force to the roles organisations most often overlook. The receptionist and the switchboard operator are frequently among the least trained and least valued people in the building, and yet they are its first voice and its first face. Give them the knowledge, authority, and respect to help, and they become among the most powerful brand assets an organisation has. One that automates the easy work and underinvests in the people left with the hard work has arranged to fail more expensively.
The fourth is whether a complaint ends with one customer or with everyone. Logging complaints is necessary, and in regulated sectors it is mandatory. But logging is not learning. The strongest service organisations I know hold regular sessions with their frontline teams, because the people answering the phones and greeting visitors hear an organisation’s problems before anyone else does, and they feed those insights back into the business to fix root causes. KPMG’s 2025 research shows how costly that gap can be. Of its Six Pillars of customer experience excellence (Integrity, Resolution, Expectations, Time and Effort, Personalisation and Empathy), Resolution was the lowest-rated among Nigerian retail banking customers for the fifth consecutive year, with customers citing delays in closing complaints and unclear communication. In Ghana, KPMG’s researchers summed up the problem in six words: “Apologies are frequent; accountability is not.” They traced it to frontline teams that lack the authority, tools or visibility to drive issues to closure, so that empathy becomes a substitute for resolution rather than a path to it. That finding comes from banking, one of our most scrutinised sectors, but I have yet to meet a hotline, help desk or reception that could not recognise itself in it. Resolving one customer’s problem is service. Fixing the cause so the next thousand customers never experience it is customer experience.
These choices matter everywhere, but they matter more in our markets. Across our continent, trust in institutions is hard-won and quickly lost. For many people, a phone call or a visit to a reception desk is their main point of contact with organisations that hold real power over their lives: the bank that holds their savings, the network that carries their livelihood, the insurer, the hospital, the government office. When someone reaches out with a problem and meets silence, the harm is not confined to her afternoon. It reaches her belief that these institutions were never meant to serve people like her.
Our customers also rarely arrive through a single polished channel. They come through USSD codes on basic phones, WhatsApp, an office in a town where the network is thin, a relative’s handset, and social media, where a complaint posted at breakfast can become a national conversation by lunch. Serving people consistently across all of those doors is far harder than any single channel makes it look. It is the real test of a service operation on the continent, and the organisations that pass it are the ones that treat every door as the front door.
There is one more reason the human voice matters. Fraudsters thrive on uncertainty, and they increasingly impersonate the very organisations customers trust. KPMG reports that Nigerian financial institutions lost ₦52.26 billion to fraud in 2024, up from ₦17.67 billion the year before, and that only a third of customers feel very secure about how their digital transactions are handled. A reachable, genuine person is one of the strongest protections a customer has: someone who can confirm what is real and what is not. Being reachable is not only good service. It is part of keeping people safe.
Regulation already recognises much of this, and I have spent much of my career on consumer protection, working closely with regulators. In Nigeria, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act sets out consumers’ rights, including the right to redress. Sector regulators from the Central Bank of Nigeria to the Nigerian Communications Commission have built complaints frameworks on the same plain principles: treat customers fairly, tell them the truth, and resolve their complaints properly and in reasonable time. I take those rules seriously. I also believe they describe a floor rather than a ceiling. Fair treatment and timely redress are the least any organisation owes the public. Loyalty is earned in what we do above that line.
What does going above it look like? Less than people imagine, and more than most organisations manage. An agent who hears the whole problem before reaching for a script. A switchboard operator who connects a caller to someone who can actually help, and checks that the connection worked. A receptionist trusted to solve a problem rather than simply redirecting it. A promised call-back that happens. An apology that sounds like a human wrote it. Almost none of this is expensive, and almost none of it can be fully automated, because what the customer is really testing is whether anyone will take ownership of her problem as though it mattered.
So this Customer Service Week, I would offer every leader, in every sector, a simple challenge: remove one thing that makes your organisation harder to reach. Sit beside your receptionist or switchboard operator for an hour and ask which callers they struggle to help, and why. Read ten complaints in full, in the customer’s own words rather than in a summary. Give one frontline colleague the authority to settle something they currently have to escalate. Then call your own organisation’s main number or walk in through the front door as a visitor would, and experience what your customers experience. I am taking up that challenge myself. Listen to the person on the other end of the line, from both sides, and ask whether your dashboards tell the same story.
The technology will keep improving, and I will keep welcoming it. It will answer more simple questions faster, and it will free us to be more human in the moments that matter, if we choose to use it that way. What it will not do is care. Caring remains stubbornly and valuably human, and in markets where competitors offer much the same products at much the same prices, it may be the most durable advantage any of us has. The person on the other end of the line is the reason a customer stays. We would do well to build our organisations around her.
About the author
Olufunmilola “Funmie” Aluko is a customer experience and brand leader with 25 years in financial services. A Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Certified Experience Management Professional (XMP) and Associate Registered Practitioner in Advertising (arpa), she serves on the Africa Regional Council of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), is a member of the American Marketing Association, and was named among the top 20 global CX leaders in 2022. Across senior roles at leading banks, she has built customer service, contact centre and complaints management operations from the ground up, institutionalising governance across complaint management, service standards and Voice of the Customer programmes. She has also led award-winning corporate brand campaigns and helped revitalise legacy institutional brands to compete in a digital-first market. Her work sits where brand promise meets service delivery, and she has long argued that the two cannot be managed apart.
She is Chief Brand and Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Experience at Union Bank of Nigeria, where she leads the Bank’s brand, marketing, communications and customer experience agenda and oversees the Contact Centre.
She holds an MBA from Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and a BA (Hons) from Lagos State University. She is also the voice behind Lessons from Corporate Nigeria, her LinkedIn series of candid reflections on leadership, workplace dynamics and the realities of building a career in corporate Nigeria.
