the pride of Africa's women entrepreneurs
by Dr Michélle Booysen
“Listening to customers must become everyone’s business. You’re either serving the customer or serving someone who is.” – Ken Blanchard
Businesses gain a competitive edge by turning customer feedback into action. Mapping the customer lifecycle highlights problem areas: presenting opportunity for improvements and integrates feedback to enhance experiences, foster loyalty, and drive long-term success.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“Consistency is what transforms average into excellence.” – Tony Robbins
Businesses engaging with customers across multiple platforms—email, social media, chat, and phone—must ensure a seamless and consistent experience. Inconsistent responses, delayed replies, or mixed messaging can confuse customers and harm brand credibility. Here’s how to maintain consistency across all customer touch-points.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
Delivering personalized customer support is essential for building strong relationships and retaining customers. However, as the business grows, responding to inquiries efficiently while maintaining a personal touch can be challenging. The key is to balance automation with human connection.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf
Customers expect more than generic service—they want personalized experiences that make them feel valued. Personalization, when embedded into business processes, strengthens customer relationships and fosters loyalty.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” – Ken Blanchard
Customer feedback is a critical resource for any business aiming to improve its service delivery and foster customer loyalty. Feedback loops, when embedded into customer service processes, provide actionable insights to refine operations and enhance satisfaction.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“Speed is the currency of the modern world.”
In general, customers expect speedy, and even instant responses. Businesses must prioritize speed without compromising quality. Automation provides the solution, streamlining workflows and reducing response times to meet and exceed customer expectations. Start by mapping your customer lifecycle process and then consider the following.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
Customer complaints are an inevitable part of business, but how an organization responds defines its reputation and future success. A process-centric approach to complaint handling ensures consistency, builds trust, and turns negative experiences into opportunities for growth.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” – Will Rogers
A seamless onboarding process sets the tone for long-term customer satisfaction and retention. For SMEs, onboarding isn’t just about signing up new clients—it’s about delivering value quickly, building trust, and laying the foundation for lasting relationships. Here’s how to design onboarding processes that create a smooth experience and drive growth.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
“The customer’s perception is your reality.” — Kate Zabriskie
Mapping the customer journey is essential for understanding how customers interact with your business and identifying ways to improve satisfaction. A well-mapped customer journey reveals gaps, highlights opportunities, and ensures every interaction adds value to the customer experience.
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by Dr Michélle Booysen
"Great customer service doesn't happen by accident. It happens by design." – Clare Muscutt
Customer service is important. Consistency, efficiency, and responsiveness in customer service are essential to effectively serve and retain customers. Processes play a pivotal role in achieving these outcomes, ensuring that every customer interaction aligns with your business standards and goals.
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by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department
Working as we do across all industries we often fall into the trap of generalising, assuming that what works well in one industry automatically delivers in another. If we group these further and say, split our membership neatly between the Manufacturers (the agricultural, manufacturing and mining worlds) and those in the Service Industry (take a bow, those who have built Consulting, Marketing, PR, Accounting and Law firms), there is so much advice within the great management books that has been written with Manufacturing in mind that cannot jump across the divide into the Service space, but why is this? Milton Friedman said: “The business of a business is business”, so just how different can these industries be?
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by Thembe Khumalo
In Africa, we talk a lot about the unbanked. In certain circles, this group is considered evidence of the opportunities for innovation that abound on the continent, and in others, they are considered a problem that we need to solve. What interests me most though, is looking at some of the reasons why these people are not choosing banks as their preferred financial partner.
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by Mandisa Makubalo
When organisations talk about wanting to set up a new business unit, there is often so much confusion within the organisation and outside the organisation. This confusion could be justified by the fact that most individuals both internally and externally are not part of the boardroom conversations where decisions are made. To some this decision is seen as a response to a business need; to some this introduction is met with great resistance as they feel left out and anxious about the thought of new people coming into the organisation. There’s concerns about who will be promoted, some immediately make accusations about unfair recruitment practices like “they already know who they want for those roles” which begins to threaten their relationship with the organisation.
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by Helena Naitsuwe Amadhila
Our businesses exist to serve customers. As entrepreneurs, we should know our customers inside out to be able to serve them better, and to meet their diverse and unlimited needs. Customers are unique people and this calls for entrepreneurs to care for their customers in a unique and individualized manner. This will ensure provision of tailor-made services and products to customers which will results in customer satisfaction and retention. These customers could also share the exciting customer care received and recommend the business to other people and as a result, there will be increase in customer base. Entrepreneurs should also know that customer care requires patience, discipline and the ability to learn, adapt, adopt, adjust and implement.
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by Brigette Mashile
One thing a client will let you have is their opinion. Whether you asked for it or not! In the years I have made dresses for many people, I have gathered a few things that people want which I still don’t have full understanding of. Some of them I have been told why, others it’s just as is. Here is the list:
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by Mandisa Makubalo
Ever heard of the word ‘cookie-cut?’ By definition, to cookie-cut is to indicate that each one is the same, like a guaranteed formula for something that works. It also means that the same approach or style is always used and not enough attention is paid to individual differences. Have you ever found yourself saying “I’m struggling to get the buy in of the C-Suite for my CX (Customer Experience) project”? Have you recently taken on a CX project as an independent consultant or entrepreneur? If your answer is yes, I invite to look as I discuss some of the reasons you might be experiencing the resistance and ways to overcome it.
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by Josefa Massinga
Let’s talk about the importance of customer feedback. But what does feedback mean and what is its importance in our business? Being an entrepreneur it is not just about selling and profiting. As entrepreneurs we offer products or services that are sold with the aim of meeting a demand. Consumers have needs and buy what they think is important to them. Because we are in this area of selling products, it is very important to hear or know what they want.
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by Mandisa Makubalo
“The greater the adoption the wider the experience divide.”
Today’s temperature is a scorching hot 35 degrees, the kind of weather that is unbearable for most households, especially those in the townships due to the quality of the housing structures. Most people are sitting outside their houses, children are playing in the streets, throwing water at each other, and some residents have made their way to the beautiful beaches of Cape Town in an attempt to escape this rather unbearable heat.
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by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department
“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.”…and so wrote Jeff Bezos in his 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders. Since then the world has just got significantly faster, customers more demanding for higher quality, lower prices and more speed, until Covid hit the reset button and the world stopped for breath.
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By the Lionesses of Africa Operations Dept
What is it that really creates a loyal customer base? This is the constant question that has hung over entrepreneurs for centuries, even Charles Dickens realized that if he was to successfully write in magazines (how his books first appeared, chapter by chapter), he’d better have a shock or WOW! moment at the end of each chapter to encourage the sales of the next magazine.
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