The Person on the Other End
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 a reception desk with an invoice that has been unpaid for four months. A traveller calls an airline hotline at two in the morning from an airport she does not know.
None of them is calm, and none has reason to be.
What happens next may depend on the person who answers. If that person listens, takes ownership and clearly explains what will happen next, the customer leaves with more than a resolution. She leaves believing the organisation can be trusted. If not, she may leave with a story she will remember for years.
I have spent 25 years in financial services, much of that time building and leading brand and customer experience programmes, contact centres and complaints operations. I have come to believe that this moment matters in every sector.
The person on the other end of the line is not simply a cost to be managed. For the customer at that moment, she is the organisation.
As organisations mark Customer Service Week, this year’s theme, “The Extra Mile,” offers a useful reminder. But I would add that the extra mile begins with the first.
The front line of an organisation is much wider than its contact centre. It includes the customer care desk, corporate switchboard, receptionist, security officer at the gate, public agency’s general enquiries line and hospital admissions desk. Many of these people may never see a customer experience strategy, yet to those they serve, they represent the brand, culture and promise of the organisation.
That means any organisation with people answering its phones and doors is in the customer service business, whether it sees itself that way or not.
Human service still matters
The case for human connection is not simply sentimental.
PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 86 per cent of consumers considered human interaction moderately or very important to their experience of a brand, while 52 per cent had stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience.
Gartner has also highlighted customers’ concerns that artificial intelligence could make it harder to reach a person. Even as technology transforms customer service, the need for human intervention remains particularly important when an issue is complex, sensitive or urgent.
The future, therefore, should not be viewed simply as agentless service. It is more likely to be a future in which technology handles routine transactions while trained people focus on the moments that require judgement, empathy and ownership.
Technology can check a balance at midnight, track an order or reset a password without a queue. Those are genuine improvements. But technology can also become a wall when customers encounter endless menus, chatbots with no clear human escalation or switchboards that never connect them to someone who can help.
The technology does not make that choice. Leaders do.
Measure what customers experience
One of the biggest challenges for service organisations is knowing what to measure.
A contact successfully “contained” by an automated system may appear to be a saving. But containment and resolution are not the same thing. A customer who abandons an attempt to reach an organisation has not necessarily had a successful experience.
Leaders should therefore pay close attention to whether customers' issues are resolved at the first attempt, how much effort customers have to make, and whether they would speak positively about the organisation afterwards.
Dashboards can tell us how an operation is performing. They do not always tell us how the customer feels while experiencing it.
I keep particularly close to a finding from PwC: while nearly nine in ten executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years, only about four in ten consumers say the same.
That gap should concern every leader.
Invest in the people behind the service
The hardest case to make during budget discussions can be the case for people rather than platforms. Yet the ability to remain calm when a customer is angry, identify the concern beneath a complaint and make a fair decision quickly is a real skill.
It deserves to be developed and rewarded.
This applies especially to roles organisations sometimes overlook. Receptionists and switchboard operators may be among the least trained people in an organisation, yet they are often its first voice and first face.
Give them the knowledge, authority and respect to help, and they can become powerful brand assets.
The same principle applies to complaints. Logging complaints is necessary, but logging is not learning. Frontline employees hear about organisational problems before many others do. Their experiences should feed back into the business so that recurring problems can be addressed at their source.
KPMG’s 2025 West Africa Banking Industry Customer Experience Survey found that Resolution remained the lowest-rated of its six customer experience pillars among Nigerian retail banking customers for the fifth consecutive year, with customers citing delays in closing complaints and unclear communication.
The lesson extends beyond banking: resolving one customer’s problem is service. Fixing the cause so the next thousand customers do not experience the same problem is customer experience.
Every door is the front door
These issues matter particularly in African markets, where trust in institutions can be hard-won.
Customers interact with organisations through USSD, WhatsApp, social media, physical branches, offices and telephone lines. A customer may use a basic phone in one interaction and a digital platform in another.
The challenge is to provide a consistent experience across all those doors.
There is also a growing security dimension. As fraudsters increasingly impersonate trusted organisations, a genuine and reachable human being can help customers determine what is real and what is not.
Being reachable is therefore not only good customer service. It can also help customers protect themselves.
The extra mile starts here
Going the extra mile does not always require a grand gesture.
It can be an agent who listens before reaching for a script. A switchboard operator who makes sure a caller reaches the right person. A receptionist trusted to solve a problem instead of simply redirecting it. A promised callback that actually happens. An apology that sounds human.
Almost none of these actions is extravagant.
What customers are really testing is whether somebody will take ownership of their problem as though it matters.
So, this Customer Service Week, I would offer leaders in every sector a simple challenge: remove one thing that makes your organisation harder to reach. Sit beside your receptionist or switchboard operator and ask which callers they struggle to help. Read customer complaints in their own words. Give a frontline employee the authority to resolve an issue that currently requires unnecessary escalation.
Then call your own organisation’s main number or walk through its front door as a customer would.
Technology will continue to improve, and it should. It can make service faster, simpler and more accessible. But the opportunity is to use technology to free people to be more human when human attention matters most.
The person on the other end of the line is not an interruption to the customer experience.
She is the customer experience.
About the Author
Olufunmilola “Funmie” Aluko is a customer experience and brand leader with 25 years of experience 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) and is a member of the American Marketing Association.
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 on leadership, workplace dynamics and building a career in corporate Nigeria.
