Customer Service Week is a good moment to ask about the five miles we put in the customer’s way
Linda Shininge
Customer Service Week runs from 5 to 9 October, with Global Customer Experience Day on the 6th. Across Namibia, organisations will thank the people who serve customers every day. That is deserved. But it invites a harder question: why does anyone need to go the extra mile in the first place?
Peter Drucker argued in The Practice of Management (1954) that a business’s purpose is to create a customer. Most organisations would agree. Look at how they are built, though the customer often looks like an afterthought.
Marketing has targets. So do sales, operations, finance, IT, risk and customer service. Each function can hit its numbers while the customer’s experience gets worse.
Customers don’t buy departments. They experience journeys. Someone who moves from the app to the call centre, to the branch, to operations and back to the call centre hasn’t experienced five successful handoffs. They have experienced one difficult company.
Digital will not fix a broken journey
Namibia is digitising fast. According to Financial Afrik’s summary of the Bank of Namibia’s 2025 Annual Report, the payment system handled nearly 67 million transactions worth about N$996 billion, up 11% in volume and 10% in value, with mobile applications driving much of the shift.
The same summary records N$53 million in EFT fraud and N$19.9 million in remote card fraud for the year. Digital scales everything: speed, convenience and failure.
The danger is automating a bad process. A confusing form becomes a confusing online form. A long queue becomes a digital queue. An unhelpful employee becomes an unhelpful chatbot.
Forrester’s 2026 predictions, published last October, quantify the risk.
It forecast that three in ten firms will damage their total-experience growth this year through frustrating AI self-service, because chatbots and virtual agents get launched before they are ready, often under cost pressure.
Its customer service predictions add that service quality will get worse before it improves, as scaling AI exposes gaps in processes, data quality, knowledge management and change management.
Forrester also expects real gains for some, with one in four brands seeing a 10% rise in successful simple self-service interactions. The common thread is that the gains depend on foundational work.
So before asking where to put a chatbot, ask:
• Why does the customer need to contact us at all?
• Why can’t they complete this transaction themselves?
• Why are we asking for information we already hold?
• Why can’t our channels see the same journey?
• Why does a complaint escalate before anyone owns it?
Therefore, technology should remove friction, not digitise it.
The experience starts before the employee
Telecommunications makes this plain. CRAN’s quality-of-service standards focus on measurable indicators such as call completion rates and network availability, with the stated aim of improving customer satisfaction. Customers ask simpler questions: can I connect, can I pay, can I get help?
Earlier this year, CRAN pressed Telecom Namibia to stabilise its network after outages between January and May, and Telecom Namibia acknowledged that its service performance had not consistently met expected standards.
Whatever the cause, the lesson applies in every sector. When the network, the payment or the system fails, the damage is done before the customer speaks to anyone, and the frontline employee inherits it.
It is also why “everything digital” is the wrong goal for Namibia. In April, CRAN announced N$42.1 million under Phase II of the Universal Service Fund to extend mobile infrastructure to rural and underserved areas, including 15 public institutions such as schools and clinics.
The programme supports the NDP6 target of lifting internet penetration from 53% to 90% by 2030. Until that gap closes, and for the many customers who simply want a person, physical and digital channels must work as one experience. What the app knows, the branch should know.
Stop asking employees to cover for the system
Telling people to “deliver exceptional service” without the tools or authority to do it is not a strategy. Outdated systems, fragmented information, unclear policies, excessive approval layers and thin training all land on the person at the counter or on the phone.
Forrester’s Total Experience Score, introduced in 2025 to combine brand and customer experience, added an Employee Experience Index in 2026, reflecting its view that the three must be aligned.
If an employee must open five systems to answer one question, don’t be surprised when the customer waits. If three approvals are needed to settle a simple complaint, don’t be surprised when the customer gives up.
Empowerment is decision rights and working tools, not motivational speeches.
Measure the outcome, not the interaction
A call centre can post excellent handling times while customers still can’t solve their problem. A branch can score well on satisfaction while customers return three times.
An app can look beautiful while the transaction keeps failing. Better questions are: did the customer get what they came for, how much effort did it take, was it resolved the first time, and did they have to contact us again?
A caution on journey maps. Forrester predicts journey mapping will decline in use, partly because maps get produced in isolation from the teams that have their own roadmaps and targets.
A map nobody owns is just a poster. The fix is accountability, not more mapping.
Five things to do before the next technology purchase
1. Pick one journey and give it one owner. Choose one of the ten things customers most often come to you for, map it from the customer’s side, and name a single executive accountable for the outcome across departments.
2. Count the handoffs and the repeats. Every transfer, repeated question and return visit is a measurable cost to the customer.
3. Simplify before you automate. Fix the process, clean the data, repair the knowledge base, remove unnecessary approvals and connect the systems. Then automate.
4. Assign channels by need. Simple transactions: digital. Routine status enquiries: self-service. Complex decisions: human plus digital. Complaints: a human owner supported by technology. Sensitive moments: a person.
5. Make it a leadership issue. The CEO, technology, operations, HR, risk, marketing and finance each own part of the experience. If only the customer service department owns it, it will not change.
Then apply a Drucker test: if the customer is the purpose, can the customer see that in how we operate? And how many of our processes exist because they create customer value, rather than because they make us easier to manage?
Redefining the extra mile
We usually picture the extra mile as something an employee does for a customer. The bigger opportunity is what the organisation does before the customer asks.
Instead of “Please contact us if your payment hasn’t reflected,” the organisation says, “We can see your payment hasn’t reflected, we’ve found the issue and we’re fixing it.” Instead of “We have transferred your complaint,” one person owns it until it is resolved.
That is the extra mile. Not more effort, but better design.
The greatest extra mile we can give customers this Customer Service Week is not asking our employees to walk farther. It is removing the distance between the customer and the outcome they came for.
*Linda Shininge is a certified customer experience and digital transformation professional
