Amazon Vs Nakumatt: Customer Care Case Study

I will preach customer care till the kingdom come. Reason being, Kenyan businesses have a way of treating customers as a necessary evil, to be exploited and thrown into the trash can at the earliest opportunity.

The other day, I ordered a couple of books from Amazon.com to be delivered to my postal address. There is an unproven rumour that Kenyans aren’t avid readers, I banked on it and hoped that my books would be delivered safely, and also, I had ordered a classic before and got it safely, way before the estimated delivery time. This time, I wasn’t so lucky, one week into the ETA, I didn’t have my books, so I thought to write a note on the customer feedback page. I didn’t expect much, I mean really, Amazon is a big corporation, a random email from Kenya? Losing me as a customer wasn’t going to cost them much in profits, they had bigger fish to fry.

2 hours later, I get a response (gasp)! Apologies, a promise that if a month elapsed before I got my books, they’d ship another set, and an immediate refund of the shipping costs. I wanted to reply and tell them it’s not necessary to refund my shipping costs. Really, they were being far too kind!

After all, I’m used to this:

I walk into Nakumatt Mega (Sorry, but this is my blog, I name and shame them), to their ‘fresh’ stuff bakery, with the aim of tasting their black forest (I’m a cake connoisseur of sorts). I buy a slice of cake, head on home, only to realise that said cake is not only past it’s prime, it’s actually stringy. As a rule, I won’t eat black forest that is past one day old. Stringy cake, is a rather tall order…

I head back to the supermarket, to politely inform them that their cake is not only not ‘fresh’ as they promise, it’s likely to cause their customers grief. I’m informed that I either pick another stale cake, or I lose my money. I am not one to risk, I wish them blessings, and walk, swearing never to buy anything from the ‘fresh’ bakery at Nakumatt Mega, vow to write a post about it, and tell anyone who will care to listen, that they sell stale cake. I had the option of going to management, but I figured, if management cared, they wouldn’t sell stale cake to start with.

They say one happy customer will earn you 3 new ones, one unhappy customer loses you 7 potential ones.

In Kenya, this is rather common.

I could give other examples;

of the Steers Chicorello hot sub that had pineapple last week (zero quality control), and I thought it would be hopeless to complain, because there was no chance of them replacing my hot sub

I could talk about those beauty shops in town where they follow you around as you window shop, like you’re a thief

I could talk about Cellar (the restaurant opposite Methodist Guest House), where we had to wait for almost 2 hours for a meal, only for them to skip an order and we had to share the food because it was getting late

Why are we robbing our customers?