Before writing anything else, you’d better define ETDBW. is short for “Easy to do business with”. Why would such a measure be necessary? Well, if you’re like most people, you’ve probably interacted with organizations that seemed to go out of their way to make it hard to do business with them. Two stories will illustrate the point.

Several years ago (before electronic payments came to Nigeria) I ordered a hundred copies of a book from Amazon.com, the online bookstore. I managed to mail them a check via DHL. Someone next to him received the package. And then… And then he more or less disappeared without a trace.

I began a series of online correspondences with customer service staff trying to find out the whereabouts of the check to no avail. Twelve weeks, eleven emails (provoking increasingly evasive responses), and ten customer service clerks later, there was still no idea where the check was. So I decided to take my case to a higher court. There was a small problem: nowhere on the Amazon.com website was there an email address I could write to. Then I got the brilliant idea to choose the names of the best photos on their corporate page and think of possible email addresses and write to them to present my complaint.

Within a day, I received an email from the customer service manager apologizing for the missing check and evasive responses. He assured me that the initial check never cleared and suggested that I send a replacement if I still wanted to go through with the transaction. I did. Problem solved.

More recently, a well-known Nigerian bank sent its representatives to market its services to Nigerians living abroad, the so-called diaspora. A friend of mine who has been in Canada for about ten years but is starting to hunger for roots in his homeland decided to take him up on his offer and open an account. So he downloaded the forms, printed them, filled them out, signed them, and mailed them to me to complete the process down here. Since I happen to have an active account at the same bank, I expected it to be a piece of cake. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

After navigating a series of hurdles apparently designed to discourage me from opening the account, I arrived at the biggest joker: My friend’s international passport, a photocopy of which I had included for identification purposes, was too old. It had recently expired. Determined to move on, my friend went through the process of obtaining a new Nigerian passport through the Nigerian embassy in Canada. He scanned it and mailed it to me.

Triumphantly, I printed it out and took it to the bank, where they told me they should see the original passport. Original passport! The guy lives in Canada! In any case, they told me, the passport was too new. Too new!

I finally got fed up with the whole process and wrote an email to the CEO of the bank. The next day, I received a phone from the bank’s headquarters. They apologized for the trouble I was going through, explained that they needed a definitive ID for my friend, and offered to go ahead and open the account if I agreed to support his application documents to prove I knew him. I was very happy to do it. Problem solved.

What lessons can we draw from these my experiences?

Your Employees Should Serve the Customer, Not Internal Procedures:

CEOs, business owners, and senior managers are often alert to this need to be customer-focused. Witness the quick responses once my “cases” reached the top. Customer-facing employees need to be educated on what the real priorities are.

Your Employees Should Know the Whys of Your Policies and Procedures:

If employees know why the procedures were implemented, they are in a better position to judge when exceptions are appropriate and can suggest alternative solutions that ensure a pleasant customer experience without violating the original purpose of the procedures.

Your people must be empowered:

Employees must be able to fix bugs without going through layers of approval. They need to be able to make it up to a customer who has been poorly served for some reason.

So take a look at your own organization and tell me really, what is your ETDW rating?