How can customer complaints be addressed more efficiently via ICT?

It has always puzzled me that despite the communication strides that the internet allows, here in Kenya we are largely still dependent on archaic models of customer care. These usually involve phone calls, letters to ‘The Watchman’/newspaper and/or visits to a physical customer care facility. While all of these platforms have their uses, I would think that the reduction in broadband price as well as the ease of access to a mobile phone would have significantly improved this sector.

Some time back conversation on this began, as I highlighted here between Ramah, Sunny, Nanjira, Asif and I. However, somewhere along the line it was lost in a sea of other personal priorities. However, recently my friend Anthony Wanderi revived my interest in it via a whatsapp chat that he graciously agreed for me to share and that has quite a few ICT based solutions proposed that I really liked. The below is his contribution to the conversation in bold:

Anthony Wanderi: “The mapping idea on your blog would have had my vote. Map complaints based on pre-selected topics and when a complaint got enough votes, whether on Twitter/G+/Facebook it would be communicated to residents from that area of complaint via SMS.”

Muthoni (Me): Here Anthony introduces an idea I had not thought about. Usually in many instances, people suffer from poor/compromised service in a similar location. For example, one gets food poisoning in restaurant X in Nairobi’s CBD, people in Nairobi/CBD would benefit from knowing restaurant X poisoned someone. And information regarding how the restaurant addressed the matter so that they are able to make more informed choices. The restaurant is also more likely to act in an ethical manner if they know other people (in their direct target audience) will find out. Word of mouth, amplified!

Anthony Wanderi: There would be issues with this of course (opt in, charges, frequency of updates etc) but those are technicalities that can be addressed. Also, in case a premium number is needed for this we could rope in a telcoms provider and perhaps pitch it as a social responsibility project?

Muthoni: With this second point, one would in my opinion benefit greatly from a telcom partnership. However, my biggest hesitation would be that they would use this partnership to reduce evidence/influence the visibility of complaints against them. Perhaps a better partnership would be with a consumers’ advocate group? Also how would people sign up to this service and how would they control the rate and quality of messaging they would receive. A highly attuned user experience menu would need to be created for this in my opinion. One similar to the Safaricom+ and Mpesa menus that people have in their phones. This could be somehow downloaded into one’s phone. The best way people could find out about this would be via advertising, sensitization and education as well.