The Sunday Mail
A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow!
Business success is driven by experiences and this is only possible for companies that can figure out how to transform their businesses to the digital platform.
Customers are spending more and caring more about what they buy, putting more effort and consideration into what they buy. Even the payment method is also of much consideration hence, customer convenient, flexible payment methods should be offered.
The continued improvements in technology has not spared the world’s financial services sector. Gone are the days when one had to move around carrying loads of cash. In today’s world this has been replaced by digital wallets.
Why carry cash or waste time in bank queues, when you can simply swipe your card at any point of sale machine or do all the banking with your phone. The security pins on both the bank cards and mobile wallet makes it impossible for anyone else without the secret numbers to break into these digital wallets.
In Zimbabwe the cash crunch – now a perennial problem – has seen many businesses and customers shifting from cash transactions to mobile money payment platform, which are smart, safe and easy to use.
According to research about 6,4 million Zimbabweans have active mobile subscriptions and are registered with at least one of the five registered mobile money service providers, thanks to the high penetration of mobile phones.
By this virtue our society is now cashless. Nonetheless, the inefficiencies of these mobile money service providers have left their customers with more tears than smiles.
It is no secret that in this day and age services cannot be delivered without technology but local businesses lack adequate internal technology transformation required to shift from just being a product or service provider to an end-to-end life solution provider.
In spite of the huge uptake of their services, they are lacking a corresponding improvement in the quality of their service. Customers are plagued by a lot of challenges ranging from systems failure, network challenges while the service providers are failing to solve those challenges promptly.
Noise about the poor service has been made on almost all media platforms but it looks like its falling on deaf ears. One is forced to think that either these companies are so overwhelmed with the demand for their services that they are failing to cope or they are unwilling to give their best shot to customers.
One mobile money services provider who holds the largest market share has been reported to be the biggest culprit when it comes to poor customer service.
Customers’ funds are randomly put in suspense accounts whenever they attempt to do transactions. In most cases customers are not forewarned of a system breakdown but rather discover it when their transactions fail to go through.
It is only courteous for these companies to devise communication methods that will alert every customer if there are any challenges rather than surprise customers with unsuccessful transactions.
Who should pay for the service providers system challenges?
Customers have been made to waste a considerable amount of time with retailers because of system failures. Consumers are having their money deducted from their mobile wallets but that money is neither posted to the retailer’s wallet or reversed back into their wallets.
In one case, one customer was frustrated after spending close to five hours in a fuel queue and when it was his chance to get the fuel, he completed the monotonous mobile money payment procedure but was sent away without the fuel because his money was not reflecting on the merchant’s phone.
Unfortunately, the fuel station staff could not assist this customer but rather gave him a mammoth task to go to the mobile money service provider’s nearest branch and claim a transaction reversal.
The sad thing is that in most cases these reversals are not done in real time. At times they can take days, if not weeks, before the money is reversed back into the customer’s account.
The process is slow and does not take into account that the customer is operating in a hyper-inflationary environment where money is losing value at the speed of lightning, thus it will not be worth the value it held on the particular date when the transaction was done.
It is the duty of the retailer and the mobile service providers to rectify the system challenge on their customers’ behalf. However, in an act of lack of customer care, customers are made to leave goods in the shop and visit the mobile money service provider for rectification at their own cost.
In other words, customers would have wasted time doing shopping for goods and services that they will never get to take with them, but must rather fork out transport money to visit the nearest mobile money service provider branches, spent productive time queueing to be served and wait for some days for the reversal.
At the end of the day, most customers do not follow up on their monies especially if these are small values and in some cases the customers are senior citizens who cannot afford to be moving up and down.
Transport costs are high and if calculated correctly it will cost more to travel to the nearest branch than the money being claimed. Thus, customers are literary donating money to these not-so-customer-sensitive mobile money service providers.
This is just another passionate plea to these mobile money service providers to be customer considerate!
Inefficient businesses should not be allowed to thrive as they can only bring more misery to the already overburdened customers. It is sad to note that companies that have the most customers are the ones taking the same customers for granted.
Mobile money service providers and other industry players must not operate in silos when transacting but must embrace the omni-channel approach. Their operations should be synergised in a way that they give both their customers a seamless shopping experience.
Cresencia Marjorie Chiremba, is a marketing enthusiast with a strong passion for customer service. For comments and suggestions, she can be reached on [email protected] or on 0712 979 461
