Getting Away With Less Than The Best

Some time ago, I was in a restaurant in Nairobi. It was posh, but not as grand as it made itself out to be. I was on driver duty that night, so I was the poor slob who had to make do with drinking soda and water all evening. I wouldn’t have minded it, until I saw the bill for the soft drinks. One 300ml bottle of soda cost – wait for it – KSh 180. There’s nothing particularly new about exorbitant prices for drinks in restaurants, but for an establishment to charge almost ten times the cost of the drink at wholesale (the price of a bottle of Coke to the restaurant is around KSh 19) seemed quite egregious.

The solution many would have offered is the usual one – the customer is always right; your money is your vote, and by withholding it, you’re making a point to the management of the establishment – but it seemed rather pointless at this stage. There were dozens of people happily imbibing around me, and the fact that it was a private party on a particularly rainy night meant that relocating was not an option. It would also have been slightly futile to tell off the poor waiter for the restaurant’s pricing policy. There was still the option of going onto social media – our usual recourse nowadays – but the Kenyan Internet space has gotten polluted to the level where one observation can induce a deluge of tangential comments that lose the whole essence of what the original complaint was about.

So the disconcerting question arises – have we been thinking about this all wrong? Has our obsession with the latest in management thinking – branding, customer service and the like – blinded us to the fact that often the customer experience is not a breathtaking one? That much of the time we will tolerate less than optimal service because we may not be bothered enough to change this dynamic?

These questions are becoming crucial in this day and age, in which the prevailing wisdom is that companies are collections of brands (and brands themselves), which means that they’re nothing more or less than the repository of emotional interactions between themselves and consumers. Everyone and everything is branding themselves these days, and the ultimate measure of success on this scale is when a corporate trademark induces in consumers a one-word emotion (whether that be ‘happiness’ or ‘sophistication’ or ‘family’). This may be the case, and experts in marketing and branding may say that all corporations and all products should induce this reaction.

But let’s face it, some of our consumer interactions are so fleeting, or so routine, that this may not be as important as it is made out to be. Yes, the neighbourhood kiosk operator or vegetable seller may not be an expert at customer service or surge pricing, but as long as they treat us fairly decently (and don’t mind us turning up in a worn t-shirt and slippers), we will not be changing our routine of shopping there. What about the one petrol station in your estate? The only bus company that goes directly from Nairobi to your ‘shags’? They may not be the best in class at the service they provide and the manner in which they provide it, but it may not be worth the effort to complain and protest and try and get them to be so (and worse, they may not even understand what your complaint is).

You may try nit-picking at them on social media, but what if they do not even own smartphones, let alone have high-tech quick response departments that keep an eye on their online and offline reputations?

These may sound like moot arguments in an environment in which behemoths like Nakumatt are looking at every neighbourhood with ravenous eyes, and in which consumers are supposedly becoming more sophisticated, but there are establishments that have survived for eons providing a ‘just-good-enough’ service, and even surviving in the face of competition from giants.

These observations are not be my invitation for managers to throw their customer service rulebooks out of the window. We will still prefer one kiosk to the other because the owner remembers us by name (and can provide credit when the month is ‘at a corner’). We will still wait at the bus stop for an extra fifteen minutes to board the matatu that doesn’t treat its passengers like interchangeable pieces of meat.

To a surprisingly significant extent, however, customers will consider the cost of switching providers and regard it as too inconveniencing to be worth it, and keep giving custom to these establishments. And the establishments themselves continue to survive in business (never quite growing big, which is good enough for their owners). Is this an ideal situation? No it isn’t, but as long as it is the prevailing one, we will continue in this less-than-happy dance. Unhappy with the price of soda, but unwilling to withstand the deluge to save a few shillings.

Also published in the Business Daily on 6 May 2014 on http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Why-businesses-get-away-with-less-than-the-best/-/539548/2304600/-/3a5pxsz/-/index.html