While organisations carry the responsibility to train staff, design systems, and set standards, customers play a quieter but equally influential role in shaping what service culture becomes.
If customer care is to improve meaningfully, consumers must participate more deliberately too.
We are three months away from Customer Service Week, and the question I find myself asking is not how organisations will celebrate it, but whether anything will meaningfully change once the banners come down and the emails stop.
Last year, when I wrote an article questioning whether Tanzanian customer service matched global standards, the piece went viral. The comments were revealing. They carried frustration, fatigue, and long-standing dissatisfaction. What was less visible was follow-through. A year later, it is worth asking a harder question. How do we, as customers, contribute to the problem we are criticising, and what will we, the consumers do differently?
While organisations carry the responsibility to train staff, design systems, and set standards, customers play a quieter but equally influential role in shaping what service culture becomes. This is particularly visible during Customer Care Month, which often arrives with mass emails, scripted greetings, and temporary enthusiasm, but little structural change. If customer care is to improve meaningfully, consumers must participate more deliberately too.
One of the most overlooked levers for improving service is feedback, especially positive feedback. Research in organisational psychology shows that positive reinforcement is a powerful driver of behaviour change. Gallup reports that 80 percent of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged.
Organisations with high engagement levels see 21 percent higher profitability, 17 percent greater productivity, and 41 percent lower absenteeism. Yet globally, only 21percent of workers are highly engaged . Furthermore, research from firms like Gallup and Bain & Company prove that Customer-centric organisations also outperform peers, achieving up to 8 percent higher revenue growth.
Yet most customers only speak up when they are angry. Complaints are voiced loudly, often informally, and frequently in the wrong places. Praise, when it exists, is shared privately or not at all. This creates a distorted feedback loop where organisations receive detailed data on what is failing, but very little information about what is working. In such systems, improvement becomes reactive rather than intentional.
It is also important to acknowledge that customer effort does not exist in a vacuum. Many official feedback channels are inaccessible, slow, or performative, designed more to signal responsiveness than to enable it. Even when customers do provide thoughtful feedback, positive or corrective, it often fails to travel beyond inboxes or reports.
In many organisations, praise never reaches frontline staff, supervisors, or performance systems where reinforcement actually occurs. Customer service should function as a feedback ecosystem, rather than a linear exchange. Between the moment a customer speaks and the moment behaviour changes, there are multiple internal handoffs where insight can stall, dilute, or disappear entirely. Without addressing these systemic gaps, even well intentioned consumer engagement eventually erodes.
Here is a concise action lists organisations can consider:
Make feedback visible and consequential by acknowledging receipt, communicating outcomes, and closing the loop consistently.
Convert feedback into recognition by integrating it into performance reviews, promotion decisions, and team evaluation, including for non customer facing roles. Lower the cost of participation by designing feedback channels that are simple, accessible, and respectful of time and emotional labour.
Model responsiveness at leadership level by meeting feedback with curiosity, accountability, and visible follow-through rather than defensiveness or silence.
When organisations make feedback accountable they create the conditions in which customer participation becomes meaningful rather than performative. Speaking up (especially on positive customer feedback )requires intention. And this feedback has value when it reaches the right people who can act on it. Complaining to friends or venting online feels good, but it rarely changes anything. Better service emerges when both sides choose to engage with intentionality.
