Pascal Oparada
Femi Akinlani went to a nearby ATM point to make a cash withdrawal. He was debited but not paid. He was flustered, and considering the mammoth crowd that is always packed outside banking premises these days due to COVID-19, he wondered how he would easily complain to his bank.
It is not the first time Akinlani has had such a glitch. He had always resolved such complaints via social media, especially Twitter. All he needed to do was complain by tweeting at his bank.
Their responses usually take minutes before resolving the issues, Akinlani said.
The snag, this time, is that while Akinlani is on Twitter by bypassing government restrictions through a virtual private network (VPN), his financial institution is not, due to the ban.
He cannot reach them through social media as usual.
“This time, there is no way I can reach them because they are not on Twitter anymore due to the ban,” he said.
Customer care agents are exasperated. Petty complaints that could be resolved through social media are taking ages.
A customer care service agent, Anu Omilani said since the Twitter ban, their relationship with bank customers has become fractious.
“Most of the issues we handle nowadays were usually resolved online, especially on Twitter,” Omilani said.
“Businesses in Nigeria use digital media to reach customers, expose their brands and communicate with various stakeholders. That will be affected by this erratic decision, Gbenga Sesan, executive director of the Paradigm Initiative, a pan-African social enterprise working on digital inclusion and rights,” told Al Jazeera.
Apart from making a living through Twitter, brands in the country are losing touch with their customers.
The ban on Twitter affects customers as much as it affects vendors and companies, says Vera, a customer service representative in a Nigerian bank, also asked to use a pseudonym.
In keeping with the COVID restrictions, customers have to wait for long periods before accessing in-bank services.
But for a lot of social media users, tweeting at a bank does the trick. With this option of being disconnected, customers would have to tailor their complaints through other channels. Those channels are going to get swamped, leading to a longer wait time, Vera told Foreign Policy magazine.
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Brand experts say brands’ relationships with their customers have become fractious and almost toxic due to the ban on microblogging site in Nigeria.
Okechukwu Eze, a brands analyst, says many customers are losing confidence in brands ability to handle and resolve complaints due to the ban.
He said what usually takes days to resolve have become protracted because many brands that usually respond on social media can no longer do so.
Brands are hurting. Customers are also hurting. Customers who have got used to lodging complaints on social media are the most affected by the ban, Eze said.
Because of the real-time nature of Twitter, it is an easy and seamless avenue for complaints resolution, Eze says.
The brand-customer relationship aside, job losses have soared since the ban.
Social media handlers, most of whom freelancers engaged by brands, have become redundant.
Parliament’s minority caucus warned the suspension was costing Nigerians “billions of naira daily.”
Dumebi Iyeke, a research analyst with the Financial Derivatives Company, said it would hit young Nigerians – among whom there is a 45% unemployment rate – the hardest, says Reuters.
“We are looking at a potential loss in their revenue,” Iyeke said, adding that it could further lower living standards amid high inflation.
NOI Polls estimates that 39.6 million Nigerians use Twitter – 20% of them for business advertisement and 18% to look for employment. Experts warn its lack of ready availability – it is accessible using Virtual Private Networks that mask location – could ripple across the economy.
“The ban has significant collateral damage,” said Muda Yusuf, director-general of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce, who said that a “sizeable number of citizens” use Twitter to make a living, reports Reuters.
On the first week of the Twitter ban, NetBlocks, a watchdog organisation that monitors cyber-security and governance of the Internet, reports that each hour of the social media gagging costs Nigeria about $250,000 (N102.5 million), bringing the daily loss to N2.5 billion. It means the economy would have lost approximately N7.5 billion in just three days.
The suspension has already created a market access gap for millions of small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) that use the platform to reach their customers. It could potentially complicate the challenges COVID-19 and other structural defects had imposed on businesses. Also hit is the e-commerce market in the country, estimated at $12 billion.
Twitter is real-time and conversations are happening real-time. It is a great platform for brand-customer engagement.
