By Dr. Abiola Salami

Because customer service is no longer principally about whether the person behind the counter smiles.

Increasingly, there may not even be a counter. The bank now lives in your phone. Customer experience happens when you attempt a transfer at midnight. When your card is declined. When an account is debited but the beneficiary is not credited When suspected fraud occurs. When you need a reversal. When an app is unavailable. When you need clarification about a charge. When you try to speak to someone because the technology has failed.

That means customer service has become a performance system.

The Frontline Cannot Compensate for a Broken System
Many organisations still treat customer service as primarily a people problem i.e. train the staff, teach courtesy, improve communication, smile more, respond politely etc. All of these things matter.But an excellent employee sitting inside a poor system cannot consistently deliver an excellent customer experience.

If technology fails repeatedly, politeness cannot replace reliability. If dispute resolution takes too long, empathy cannot replace speed. If customers cannot understand charges, friendliness cannot replace transparency. If fraud controls are weak, a good call-centre script cannot restore confidence. If responsibility moves endlessly between departments, the customer does not experience an organisation. The customer experiences frustration.

That is why the real customer-service conversation must move from behaviour to system performance.

Complaints Are Performance Data
Consider what regulatory evidence has previously revealed. Between October 2023 and September 2024, the CBN reported addressing 19,988 customer complaints, resolving 15,306 of them and facilitating refunds of approximately ₦7.05 billion and US$714,569 to customers in disputes with financial-service providers.

In its first-half 2024 Financial Stability Report, the CBN said complaints received had risen to 16,527. Fraud-related complaints accounted for 41.49 per cent, electronic/card complaints 32.57 per cent and account-management complaints 22.38 per cent.

These figures relate to earlier reporting periods and should not be presented as a description of every customer’s experience today. But they reveal something important.

Complaints are not merely irritations for customer-service departments to close. They are performance intelligence.

When the same problem repeatedly reaches customers, leadership should ask what system, process, technology, control, policy or accountability failure is producing it. That is how a performance organisation learns.

The Digital Bank Has Changed the Standard
Nigeria has become a highly digital financial market. That brings enormous convenience but it also changes customer expectations.

If a bank encourages a customer to become digital, the institution assumes responsibility for making the digital experience dependable.

The CBN’s recent reforms recognise this reality. New measures taking effect in 2026 include stronger identity verification, real-time enterprise fraud monitoring, multi-factor authentication around certain payment controls and additional security requirements around mobile banking.

This is important because trust is now part of infrastructure.

A customer does not experience cybersecurity as a regulatory framework. The customer experiences it as Is my money safe?

A customer does not experience interoperability as a technical architecture. The customer experiences it as Did my transfer go through?

A customer does not experience complaints management as organisational design. The customer experiences it as When something went wrong, did my bank solve it?

That is where customer-service performance becomes measurable.

Perhaps We Need a Different Customer-Service Scorecard
Imagine if every bank’s leadership team used Customer Service Week to examine five questions; not how many branches were decorated or how many appreciation posts were published.

But (a) how frequently customers encountered failed transactions; (b) how quickly disputes were resolved; (c) how much customer effort was required to solve a problem; (d) how reliably channels performed; and (e) are recurring complaints were disappearing because their root causes had actually been fixed.

That would change the conversation; because the objective should not be to become excellent at handling complaints. The objective should increasingly be to design systems that reduce the avoidable causes of complaints.

Customer Experience Is a Leadership Issue
This is where Performance Leadership™ becomes relevant.
Customer experience is often delegated downward to Customer-Service Officers, Branch Managers, Relationship Managers and Contact-centre teams but many of the things that determine customer experience are controlled elsewhere.

When the experience is consistently poor, leadership cannot solve it merely by demanding better attitudes from frontline employees. The system itself must improve.

Visit www.tppafrica.com for the full article

Dr. Abiola Salami is a World-Class Performance Strategist and the developer of Performance Leadership™. His work focuses on enabling leaders and organisations close the gap between investment, capability, execution and measurable outcomes.