West Africa Association Launches Portal to Improve Nigeria Customer Service

Rebecca Ejifoma

The West Africa Association of Customer Service Professionals (WAACSP), the umbrella body of customer service practitioners in ECOWAS, launched a customer satisfaction survey portal.

The portal aims to improve the quality of service delivery in the Nigerian Customer Service Index (NCSI).

The association noted this in a press statement its Board Chairperson, Yvonne Ohui MacCarthy, signed and issued on Tuesday.

The statement read in part, “Through the platform, citizens can submit views on the state of service delivery they experienced.

“The NCSI is a multi-sector customer satisfaction survey platform that allows customers of Nigerian businesses to give feedback on the quality of service delivery across sectors and also gauge the state and quality of services they render.”

According to the association, the index will receive submissions which would be analysed and collated to produce periodic reports to show the growth or otherwise in service delivery sector by sector.

It added: “The index will rank and rate organisations, show indices, present trends and highlight ways to improve service quality.

“The NCSI annual report will release Nigeria’s overall customer satisfaction scores, ranking and rating compared to global standards.”

WAACSP also noted that the NCSI report would release a report on our service culture as a nation and release a CS score rating and a national ranking for each sector.

“The report will release companies ranking, scores in their respective sectors, peer-to-peer reports, service improvements and shortfalls.

“The survey portal is open and accepting submissions for the year 2023. In March, our trial ran over 21 days. We had 6,307 responses, indicating public receptiveness to this initiative,” says the association.

It emphasised that this year’s survey would cover nine sectors split into 17 sub-sectors, including banking, telecoms, fintech, insurance, transportation, DISCOs, HMOs, and MDAs, among others.

“Overall, a projection of over 400 organisations are expected to be rated with an estimated 200,000 submissions over an eight-month survey period for 2023 with a growth forecast of 13 to 19 per cent year on year,” says WAACSP.

This promises to be the biggest data bank of consumer behaviour, experience, expectation, perception available for mining by organisations, the data analytics community, businesses, investors, and the public with a view to understanding and improving service delivery.

The association, however, described the index as a nonpartisan, non-governmental and not-for-profit initiative.

It aims to raise public consciousness of good and quality customer service (CS), task organisations to improve service delivery and forge continuous improvement along the CS value chain.

It continued, “In the end, consumers, organisations, and the nation will benefit from it. The NCSI initiative is the second of such customer satisfaction portals we are pioneering.”