I bring you greetings today from our customer service space in this column. This is an area of the field we are not only passionate about, but we also offer speed conversations, corrections and training, where necessary.

These gum-chewing receptionists in hospitality spaces who forget what their job descriptions are get my goat all the time.

Although I have written copiously about this from different angles, it’s never enough. I travel a lot across the world, and some of the worst customer service faux pas occur in Nigeria. And I love my country dearly, but we must understand that customer service failures are directly related to poor relationships and poor footfalls in a business, especially in the hospitality business. Why should I come back to your hotel if your staff were crappy, rude, uninterested and unprofessional?

So I arrive at Nigeria’s commercial city, Lagos, for a meeting, and I check into one of my favourite hospitality places. And by the way, it’s a highly elevated space, not well known but very well apportioned with beautiful, breathtaking grounds. I had not been there in a while, but the ambience was as beautiful as I have always remembered it.

But something had shifted, just a little bit, and it had to do with attitude and service. Upon my return to my room later in the day, tired from my many meetings, I found that my toilet was not flushing (pardon my French). The first person I complained to had the audacity to ask me if I had touched something or if, in fact, I understood how the flushing button worked. I asked him if they had some technology-orientated flushing button that prevented my daft head from comprehending flushing toilets. Of all the things in the world, you are trying to project your toilet-flushing conundrum to your guest. My fault; I can’t flush the toilet. Yup, this cannot be housekeeping’s fault or even the hotel’s fault for pretending that my room, which I want to believe was double-checked before it was allocated to me, was fine.

Customer service rules include but are not limited to clearing up the bad customer experience and replacing it with a good one so you forget the bad experience while working on a make-good proposition, but more importantly, communicating properly. Who trains front office staff in communication and public speaking? Who teaches housekeeping and waiters how to manage an angry and hurt guest? How do hotel staff manage crises?

This comment about whether or not I know what a toilet flushing entails could never rear its head if the staff knew what to say.

In fairness, they tried to move me to another room, but I was too tired.

The following morning after I left for my business of the day, the technicians, etc., fixed it. But I knew that I had been checked into a dodgy room when, by evening, my convenience space was flooded. Yeah! You did not guess. It’s a plumbing fault. A fault they knew about all along but tried their luck with the wrong person. So my room had workers going in and out, much to my discomfort, most of the day.

The entire enchilada impacts your entire business and determines whether you have return customers. These are the crème de la crème of the hospitality industry. Guests who can swear by your soft feather pillows, the pleasantness of your staff, polite staff and the absolutely decadent food at your restaurant. When I say pleasant staff, I do not mean the ones who are trying too hard; they simply irritate you. Those who want to carry you and your luggage, who greet you five times and who ask if you are enjoying the meal before you have started eating. These are a complete put-off. I wonder who taught them to drive you insane. Subtlety is the name of the game. Not six waiters hovering around you when all you want to do is eat in peace. Out here, the attention is often more about your tip than caring about you, which is so sad!

Back to meals, at one restaurant where I had gone for breakfast, I requested cold milk, qualified with “very”. The young waiter proceeded to give me lukewarm milk. So I asked her, Did you not hear me? ” She goes, “Sorry, let me go and get you cold milk.” Some other waiter was to deliver something in my room for 1pm. At 2:30pm, I had to go and remind her. “Sorry, Ma, I wanted it to be chilled, so I put it in the fridge.”

She had told me at 1pm, then she failed miserably. Could you not have called me to intimate me? “Sorry, Ma.” I don’t know if sorry cleans up this customer service mess. Something needs to be done. It adds to the minus of Nigeria’s image.

I rest!