NIGERIAN BANKS CELEBRATE CUSTOMER SERVICE. BUT ARE CUSTOMERS EXPERIENCING BETTER PERFORMANCE? by Dr. Abiola Salami, Principal, CHAMP Global Leadership Consultancy
“ Yes, let us celebrate the people, thank the customers and recognise excellent service. But when the photographs are taken and the branded shirts are put away, leadership should return to ask this important question i.e. Is it becoming easier, safer and more reliable to be our customer?” – Dr. Abiola Salami
Introduction
It is Customer Service Week and across Nigeria, organisations will celebrate their customer-facing employees.
There will be colourful clothes, photographs, social-media posts, awards, cakes and messages thanking customers. Perhaps even executives taking over call centres or branches for a few hours. There is nothing wrong with any of this.
Customer Service Week 2026 runs from October 5 to 9, under the theme “The Extra Mile.” But for Nigeria’s financial-services industry, perhaps the week should provoke the question What exactly does excellent customer service mean in modern banking?
Because customer service is no longer principally about whether the person behind the counter smiles.
Increasingly, there may not even be a counter. The bank now lives in your phone. Customer experience happens when you attempt a transfer at midnight. When your card is declined. When an account is debited but the beneficiary is not credited When suspected fraud occurs. When you need a reversal. When an app is unavailable. When you need clarification about a charge. When you try to speak to someone because the technology has failed.
That means customer service has become a performance system.
The Frontline Cannot Compensate for a Broken System
Many organisations still treat customer service as primarily a people problem i.e. train the staff, teach courtesy, improve communication, smile more, respond politely etc. All of these things matter.
But an excellent employee sitting inside a poor system cannot consistently deliver an excellent customer experience.
If technology fails repeatedly, politeness cannot replace reliability. If dispute resolution takes too long, empathy cannot replace speed. If customers cannot understand charges, friendliness cannot replace transparency. If fraud controls are weak, a good call-centre script cannot restore confidence. If responsibility moves endlessly between departments, the customer does not experience an organisation. The customer experiences frustration.
That is why the real customer-service conversation must move from behaviour to system performance.
Complaints Are Performance Data
Consider what regulatory evidence has previously revealed. Between October 2023 and September 2024, the CBN reported addressing 19,988 customer complaints, resolving 15,306 of them and facilitating refunds of approximately ₦7.05 billion and US$714,569 to customers in disputes with financial-service providers.
In its first-half 2024 Financial Stability Report, the CBN said complaints received had risen to 16,527. Fraud-related complaints accounted for 41.49 per cent, electronic/card complaints 32.57 per cent and account-management complaints 22.38 per cent.
These figures relate to earlier reporting periods and should not be presented as a description of every customer’s experience today. But they reveal something important.
Complaints are not merely irritations for customer-service departments to close. They are performance intelligence.
When the same problem repeatedly reaches customers, leadership should ask what system, process, technology, control, policy or accountability failure is producing it. That is how a performance organisation learns.
The Digital Bank Has Changed the Standard
Nigeria has become a highly digital financial market. That brings enormous convenience.
But it also changes customer expectations.
If a bank encourages a customer to become digital, the institution assumes responsibility for making the digital experience dependable.
The CBN’s recent reforms recognise this reality. New measures taking effect in 2026 include stronger identity verification, real-time enterprise fraud monitoring, multi-factor authentication around certain payment controls and additional security requirements around mobile banking.
This is important because trust is now part of infrastructure.
A customer does not experience cybersecurity as a regulatory framework. The customer experiences it as: Is my money safe?
A customer does not experience interoperability as a technical architecture. The customer experiences it as: Did my transfer go through?
A customer does not experience complaints management as organisational design. The customer experiences it as: When something went wrong, did my bank solve it?
That is where customer-service performance becomes measurable.
Perhaps We Need a Different Customer-Service Scorecard
Imagine if every bank’s leadership team used Customer Service Week to examine five questions; not how many branches were decorated or how many appreciation posts were published.
But (a) how frequently customers encountered failed transactions; (b) how quickly disputes were resolved; (c) how much customer effort was required to solve a problem; (d) how reliably channels performed; and (e) are recurring complaints were disappearing because their root causes had actually been fixed.
That would change the conversation; because the objective should not be to become excellent at handling complaints. The objective should increasingly be to design systems that reduce the avoidable causes of complaints.
Customer Experience Is a Leadership Issue
This is where Performance Leadership™ becomes relevant.
Customer experience is often delegated downward to Customer-Service Officers, Branch Managers, Relationship Managers and Contact-centre teams but many of the things that determine customer experience are controlled elsewhere.
For example, Technology decides uptime, Operations influences processing, Risk shapes controls, Finance influences fees, HR affects capability, Product teams influence design, Compliance affects onboarding, Leadership determines priorities and Culture determines whether people take ownership. Customer experience is therefore not a department. It is the cumulative result of the organisation.
When the experience is consistently poor, leadership cannot solve it merely by demanding better attitudes from frontline employees. The system itself must improve
From Customer Service to Customer Performance
In this month’s Performance Leadership Brief™, we are asking a larger question: Nigerian Banks Have Recapitalized. Can the Banks Now Recapitalize Nigeria?
One part of that question concerns credit and economic development; but another part concerns something much closer to everyday life. If our banks are becoming stronger, more capitalised and more technologically sophisticated, should customers not experience that institutional strength, better systems, faster resolution, greater reliability, clearer communication, stronger protection, less friction and more trust?
This is why Customer Service Week should not be a break from performance. It should be a review of performance.
Yes, let us celebrate the people, thank the customers and recognise excellent service.
But when the photographs are taken and the branded shirts are put away, leadership should return to ask this important question i.e. Is it becoming easier, safer and more reliable to be our customer?
Because the best evidence that an organisation values customers is not what it says during Customer Service Week. It is what customers consistently experience during the other 51 weeks of the year.
About Dr. Abiola Salami
Dr. Abiola Salami is the Principal Performance Strategist at CHAMP – a full scale professional services firm trusted by high performing business leaders for providing Executive Coaching, Workforce Development & Advisory Services to improve performance. He is the Convener of Dr Abiola Salami International Leadership Bootcamp ; The Peak PerformerTM Festival Made4More Accelerator Program and The New Year Kickoff Summit. You can reach his team on hello@abiolachamp.com and connect with him @abiolachamp on all social media platforms.
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