Does Nigeria really have no customer service?

Ask anyone in Lagos about customer service and you will probably get a laugh before you get an answer. "Customer service? In this Nigeria?" It has become one of our national jokes, right up there with the light.

But behind the joke is a habit that is quietly costing businesses their customers, their growth and, in many cases, their future.

How we see it

The popular perception is simple: in Nigeria, the customer is not king. The customer is lucky to be attended to.

Most of us know the feeling. You send a message and wait hours for a reply. You ask a simple question and get "Sorry for the inconvenience" on repeat. You walk into a store ready to buy, and it feels like you are asking for a favour. You follow up, then follow up again, then start to wonder if you are the problem.

Over time, customers adjust. We lower our expectations. We get a friend who "knows someone". Many people now have personal assistants whose job includes messaging businesses, simply because holding a normal conversation with them is exhausting.

Respect, by appearance

One of the most uncomfortable parts of service in Nigeria is how often it depends on who staff think you are.

Buy a ₦50 pen at a neighbourhood supermarket, then a similar ₦10,000 pen at a "premium" store on Victoria Island, and the experience is often the same. It can even be worse if you arrive in an ordinary car. Send a WhatsApp message from a +1 or +44 number while someone else sends the same message from +234, and the speed and warmth of the replies will rarely match.

When a business decides who deserves respect based on a car, a bag or a phone number, it is not being selective. It is turning paying customers away.

It is not that Nigerians can't serve

This is the part the joke misses. Nigerians are some of the warmest, most hospitable people in the world. Visit anyone's home and you will be fed before you can sit down.

The problem is not the people. It is the systems around them. Most frontline teams are never trained on what good service looks like. Nobody owns a complaint from start to finish. Standards live in the founder's head and never reach the new hire. And because the founder's vision almost always includes a great customer experience, the gap between what the business wants and what the customer gets is often invisible from the top.

What it costs

Customers don't always complain. They just leave.

Globally, PwC found that 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience, and 97% say customer service is crucial to their loyalty. The same research found customers will pay a 16% premium for a great experience.

Here at home, loyalty is under even more pressure. In NielsenIQ's 2025 consumer outlook, reported by Nairametrics, almost 6 in 10 Nigerian shoppers switched brands in the past year because of rising prices. Yet 63% said customer service is one of the things that makes them trust a brand. When money is tight, customers are looking for a reason to stay. Service is that reason.

Even in banking, where Nigerian institutions have invested heavily, KPMG's 2024 customer experience survey found the sector's weakest area is resolution: actually fixing customers' problems. The same report put it bluntly: loyalty is no longer a given.

Think about the restaurant that opens to a rush of excitement and closes three months later. The food may have been good. But nothing about the experience gave people a reason to come back, so the business spent its life chasing new customers instead of keeping the ones it had.

The customer side

Poor service changes customers too. When we expect to be ignored, we arrive ready to fight. We are short with staff before they have said a word. We jump from provider to provider, never staying long enough to be known.

It doesn't have to work that way. Where staff treat customers with care, customers treat staff with care in return. Good service is a symbiotic relationship: the business and the customer need each other equally.

So, does Nigeria have no customer service?

No. Nigeria has pockets of excellent service, and many businesses that genuinely want to do better. What we lack is consistency: service that does not depend on who is on shift, what you are driving or which country code you are texting from.

That is fixable. It starts with understanding what your customers actually experience, setting clear standards, training your frontline team, and checking that those standards hold.

Loyal customers are what keep a business alive. Retention should be a culture, not a campaign.

Ehen!