ONEYA: Enough with the ‘Dear Customer’ texts

I’ve had it with the ‘Dear Customer’ messages from Kenyan businesses.

Is there no end to lack of creativity in appreciating us, the dear esteemed customers?

Christmas is here with us and New Year will soon be upon us. And so will the incessant beeping of our phones because they will be inundated with one text message after the other from parastatals, banks, insurance firms, restaurants, clubs and telecommunications firms; each message less creative but more enthusiastic than the previous one. Each trying to outdo the other in its Happy Holidays Wish. As if that is even possible.

Sample this text from an insurance firm:

Dear esteemed client, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. May this festive season bring joy to you and your family. Please note that our offices will remain closed on 25th and 26th December 2018 and on 1st January 2019. Happy holidays STOP 20133.

A friend—who works in the customer care departments for one of the most reputable banks—confessed to me one day that the “STOP” messages never really worked unless “the customer was super-persistent and insisted on being removed from the service”.

This makes the idea of bulk SMSes even more puzzling.

Why, oh why, do Kenyan firms feel the need to compete with each other in sending generic messages?

And I’m not just talking about this festive season. We are subjected to the same calibre of messages right from Valentine’s Day to Christmas Day. Which makes me wonder: what exactly do these firms hope to achieve by sending these generic texts? A sense of gratitude? Loyalty maybe? Because I can assure them that when the phone beeps and the only message received is a “Dear Esteemed Customer” one, the only feeling one gets is one of deep, deep annoyance.

It doesn’t help, of course, that some of the message senders cannot be blocked. I once tried to block messages from a telecommunications company, but their money sending service got blocked too...and we can’t have that happening.

SUGGESTIONS

Instead of spamming customers’ emails and SMS inboxes with (highly unoriginal, highly recycled) messages, why not mark the special occasion of Christmas—or any other holiday for that matter—by offering something concrete, like airtime? Lunch? Entry into a raffle to win a Christmas Holiday? A treat? Something? Anything but a long-winding generic text message?

I don’t remember, even for a second, feeling appreciated or cared for by the organisation but rather deeply annoyed that they would spend so much airtime (I assume they send these messages to thousands or millions) sending blanket texts and spamming my inbox.

There’s an episode in Ally McBeal, one of my all-time favourite comedies, where a client sues a telecommunications company for sending her endless promotional messages when all she ever really wanted to hear was messages from Billy, her lover.

The spammers should think of their customers as lovers waiting to hear back from their loved ones and they should ask themselves: Is their message truly more important and worthwhile than the lover’s and if not, what can they do to make it so?

And if they answered this correctly, then hopefully they would find out that there would be no need to send those messages. They would direct the millions of shillings they spend on sending tasteless messages to more worthy marketing causes.

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