Poor Customer Service In Nigerian Media Houses

Like the saying goes 'it is a thousand times easier to criticize that to create'. The veracity of this saying can not be better proven than in the nigerian media. The media in Nigeria has the penchant for criticizing anything and everything and in most cases without even a proper Understanding of the issues on ground.

If one limits his judgment of our media houses to the contents of the news and articles they churn out daily, weekly and monthly as the case may be, you will be forced to think the media is a perfect place on earth and as such your dealings with them will leave you blindfolded by the contents of their papers.

Without a close relationship with them, you will never know how horrible they are in terms of customer service. Especially one one considers the kind of criticism they (the media) pour out on the various telecom comapnies in Nigeria.

Vanguard for example is reputed to be a strong voice in Nigeria and you'll always expect that for the sake of wanting to practice what they preach, everything possible will be done to avoid customer dissatisfaction.

Adverting is a major source of income for the media houses and why they treat their advertisers with so much disdain baffles me.

My personal experience with two of Nigeria's foremost newspapers is something you will love to forget.
Around june last year, i paid for a 3 months advertisement with Vanguard to place a text ad on their website. Behold my advert was removed before the expiration of the advert. When i called the advert department i was told some disjointed story which i could not comprehend. Alero one of them finally told me she was going to look into it. However nothing was done till this moment.

Just about a mounth ago, i also sent payment and advert to Success Digest Newspaper.
The targeted edition came out and my advert was not there. When i called the Lady in-charge to lay my complaints, i was told i should have sent it to a different e-mail address. However, the email i sent the advert to was given to me by the same Lady Busola Adesoji. So i allowed that past and sent the advert detail to the specified email address, this time with a scanned copy of the bank pay slip. As i write this blog i am so pissed because, the current edition is just out and my advert is still no where to be found.

I will like you reading this piece to know that, after sending the email containing the advert, i also called her on phone to notify her that i have sent the email and she promised me she was going to get to it immediately. What else could ui have done? Help her do the publication my self?

Now they are the media and they take us for granted because we do not have a means to expose all the inefficiencies in that industry. Thank God for Blogs.

The media in Nigeria will never grow because of things like these. Take a look at the New York times, The Herald, the Economist and several other foreign newspapers. These ones are successful because they choose to go beyond the confines of their countries thereby exposed to greater challenges of satisfying a wider spectrum of customers. Nigerian newspapers on the other hand are satisfied with Lagos and Abuja.