Customer Service Week 2026: Why Human Connection Still Defines Customer Experience – Funmie Aluko

The Person on the Other End of the Line

This Customer Service Week, the extra mile starts with something simpler: making sure that when a customer, caller, or visitor needs a human being, one is there.

By Olufunmilola Funmie Aluko | Customer Experience Leader | Chief Brand and Marketing Officer, Head of Customer Experience, Union Bank of Nigeria

On any ordinary day, in any large city, the same moment plays out thousands of times. A woman calls her mobile network because her line has been barred and she cannot reach her children’s school. A man rings a hospital switchboard, trying to find out which ward his father has been taken to. A small business owner stands at the reception desk of a large company, holding an invoice that has been unpaid for four months. A traveller dials an airline hotline at two in the morning from an airport she does not know.

None of them is calm, and none of them has reason to be. What happens next depends almost entirely on one person: the agent, operator, or receptionist who answers.

I have spent a quarter of a century in financial services, building and leading brand and customer experience programmes, contact centres and complaints operations. I have come to believe that this moment is the whole game, in every sector. The person on the other end of the line is not a cost to be managed. For the customer in that moment, she is the organisation.

This week, organisations around the world mark Customer Service Week 2026 with the theme The Extra Mile. Most of us will picture headsets and call queues. But the front line is far wider than the contact centre. It is the retail hotline and the customer care desk, the corporate switchboard, the receptionist who is the first face of a headquarters, the security officer at the gate, the person who answers the general enquiries line of a public agency, and the nurse at the admissions desk. Many of these people never see the inside of a customer experience strategy. Yet to the people they serve, they are the brand, the culture and the promise, all at once.

The extra mile begins with the first mile. Anxious people are not looking for grand gestures. They want to know that they can reach someone when it matters, and that the person they reach is calm, informed and able to help. Reachability, reliability and a human being who takes ownership: that is the first mile.

Research supports this. In PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 86 per cent of consumers said human interaction is moderately or very important to their experience of a brand, and 52 per cent had stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience. Gartner, surveying more than 5,700 customers, found that 64 per cent would prefer companies did not use AI in customer service at all, and that their biggest concern was that AI would make it harder to reach a person. Even McKinsey found that 71 per cent of Gen Z respondents see a live call as the quickest and easiest way to reach customer care.

Gartner also predicts that by 2028, not one Fortune 500 company will have fully eliminated human customer service, and that by 2027 half of the organisations that expected to significantly reduce their service workforce because of AI will have dropped those plans.

Then there are the economics. Bain and Company loyalty research led by Frederick Reichheld showed that increasing customer retention rates by just 5 per cent can increase profits by between 25 and 95 per cent.

In Nigeria, KPMG’s 2025 West Africa Banking Industry Customer Experience Survey, drawn from more than 35,000 retail customers, 5,000 SMEs and 600 corporates, shows reliability, security and digital access are now minimum requirements. Customers now benchmark experiences against the best service they receive in any industry. A decade ago, the gap between Nigeria’s highest and lowest rated retail banks was nearly eight percentage points; today it is under three. When products and platforms converge, the experience is what is left to compete on.

Nearly nine in ten executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years. Only about four in ten consumers say the same. A waiting time can look respectable on a monthly report and still feel endless to someone standing in an airport at two in the morning.

Closing that gap comes down to four choices.

First is what we do with the time technology gives back. AI-enabled contact platforms, balance checks at midnight, order tracking in seconds and password resets without a queue are good service. Used well, technology clears away routine and lets trained people focus on complicated, sensitive or frightening conversations. Used carelessly, it becomes a wall: an endless phone menu, a chatbot with no exit, a switchboard that rings out.

Second is what we choose to measure. Contained and deflected contacts look like savings, but deflection and resolution are different things. A contact can count as contained simply because the customer gave up. The number every leader should watch is how many people abandoned their attempt to reach us. Alongside it are three questions the customer answers: was the matter resolved on the first attempt, how much effort did it take, and would she speak well of us afterwards.

Third is where investment goes. The ability to stay steady while someone is furious, to hear the real worry beneath a complaint, and to decide quickly and fairly is a rare skill. It deserves to be selected for, developed and rewarded as seriously as any software. This applies especially to receptionists and switchboard operators who are often least trained and least valued, yet they are the first voice and first face of the brand.

Fourth is whether a complaint ends with one customer or with everyone. Logging complaints is necessary, but logging is not learning. The strongest service organisations hold regular sessions with frontline teams because they hear problems before anyone else. In KPMG’s 2025 research, Resolution was the lowest-rated pillar among Nigerian retail banking customers for the fifth consecutive year, with delays in closing complaints and unclear communication. In Ghana, KPMG summed it up as apologies are frequent, accountability is not.

These choices matter more in African markets where trust is hard-won. For many people, a phone call or visit to a reception desk is their main contact with institutions that hold power over their lives. Customers arrive through USSD codes, WhatsApp, offices in towns with thin network, and social media.

There is also safety. KPMG reports that Nigerian financial institutions lost 52.26 billion naira to fraud in 2024, up from 17.67 billion naira the year before, and only a third of customers feel very secure about digital transactions. A reachable, genuine person helps confirm what is real.

Regulation recognises this. In Nigeria, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act sets out consumers rights including redress. Sector regulators from the Central Bank of Nigeria to the Nigerian Communications Commission have built complaints frameworks on fair treatment, truth and timely resolution. That is the floor. Loyalty is earned above that line.

Going above it looks simple: an agent who hears the whole problem before reaching for a script, a switchboard operator who connects a caller to someone who can actually help and checks that it worked, a receptionist trusted to solve a problem, a promised call-back that happens, an apology that sounds human.

For Customer Service Week 2026, remove one thing that makes your organisation harder to reach. Sit beside your receptionist for an hour, read ten complaints in the customer’s own words, give one frontline colleague authority to settle something they currently escalate, then call your own main number as a visitor would.

Technology will keep improving, but it will not care. Caring remains human, and where products are similar, it may be the most durable advantage.

About the author:

Olufunmilola Funmie Aluko is Chief Brand and Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Experience at Union Bank of Nigeria, with 25 years in financial services. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional, Certified Experience Management Professional and serves on the Africa Regional Council of the Customer Experience Professionals Association.