LACK OF CUSTOMER SERVICE IN MALAWI

Malawian businesses have to be the most poorly managed in the world. Their owners are just profit oriented thereby lacking vision and wisdom resulting in them offering below standard goods and services and giving their customers no customer satisfaction and no value for their money.

If a business has loyal customers who pay for its goods or services with their hard earned cash, then this business has the obligation to take some of that money and invest in capital that will improve the quality of their goods or services offered to their customers, but this simply is not the case with Malawian businesses.

The reason many business owners behaviour in such a manner, especially small and medium enterprises, is simply because the reason they are in business is to get rich as quickly as possible and in order to do this they use such methods as overpricing and cost cutting to make large profit margins and do not care whether or not they are compromising the quality of their goods and services because in Malawi the customer is taken for granted.

The reason that this is allowed to go on is because the Malawian economy is under developed therefore there are only a few companies meaning very little competition. So the companies take advantage of this because they know that whether you get customer satisfaction or not, you will not have any choice but to keep coming back to them.

I thank God that I have the ability to hold my frustrations in, because heaven knows the amount of times I wanted to give an ear full to bank-tellers, shop clerks, waiters, bar tenders, minibus drivers and conductors, and if I would of, I would not have felt the slightest bit of remorse because in all cases I was not getting value for my money.

Let us talk about this bank of mine, it makes super profits with the money I lend it, but it does not have the decency to hire more banks –tellers so that its customers would get faster and more efficient service and would not spend hours standing in a queue in a hot stuffy banking hall.

To conclude let me bring into focus the other side of the problem is that Malawians are timid and do not stand up for their rights. They accept to be treated like second class citizens in their own country and do not speak out when they have been ill treated.