Kuzima.com – Giving Consumers Access to Name & Shame Unscrupulous Businesses
“7 out of 10 customers are likely to do business with you again if you resolve the conflict in their favor”, this is just one of the many inspirational entrepreneurship quotes my hair dresser has up her wall at the salon. It also intrigued my mind into thinking of how the African entrepreneurs are handling their customers. To a large extent most local business owners are more focused on wealth maximization and pay little to no attention to their customers’ satisfaction or complaints for that matter.
We all have had that experience, you go and buy a product or pay for a service from a certain vendor, but you realize that the products or services are not worth your money’s value or your time. To make matters worse, if the receipt is written, “Goods once bought cannot be returned”. If it’s a product you’ve bought,the vendor will refuse to take it back, give you your money back or exchange it with another better product. Going back to give them a piece of your mind, would be like a frog crocking inside a river hoping to scare off an elephant drinking by the river side. It just won’t work! But I bet if the frogs were in their thousands, the elephant would surely notice, possibly go away and if it must drink, it will do so with some respect for the “little crocking creatures”.
Kursor Solutions based in Accra, Ghana came up with an innovative way to allow unsatisfied customers to do just that. Unsatisfied customers were now to be taken seriously by unscrupulous businessmen and companies. They came up with a website and mobile applications platforms in which customers can name and shame various unscrupulous companies and businesses which are a rip-off to customers’ hard-earned money and valuable time. Dubbed Kuzima, which is a name coined from a Swahili word “Kusema” which means “to speak”.
Kursor Solutions came up with the Kuzima initiative after they has faced constant frustrations from various companies they were dealing with from different sectors of the Ghana’s economy. But these companies would not change despite them raising concerns. The website essentially gives the customer with unaddressed complaints, a platform to inform a bigger mass of customers both current and potential about the poor services s/he has received. This in other words alerts other customers of the unethical or substandard operations taking place at a certain company or business.
If you understand business, then you will appreciate just how devastating a bad PR-campaign can be to a business. Obviously no business would want its name to be placed on Kuzima.com, and will endeavor to take their customers complaints more seriously. This has lead to revolutionizing how the businesses are handling their customer relation approaches, making a good customer relation mandatory for any business and not a gimmick or a privilege.
However Kuzima.com is not all about naming and shaming organizations, customers can also complement the products or services they’ve received from a certain company or business. This has seen a trickledown effect of business going the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction has been achieved within their operations, so that their names can be given a good limelight at Kuzima.com. No business will pass-out the opportunity for good publicity, if it can help it. Kursor Solutions is another startup that debuted at the DEMO Africa 2012 event, after they qualified for nomination to the top 40 most innovative startups.
