A brand can spend heavily on a beautiful identity, a polished website, celebrity endorsements and clever advertising, yet lose a customer in five minutes at the point of service. That is the uncomfortable truth behind modern branding. The brand promise may begin in the boardroom and travel through advertising, packaging and social media, but it reaches its final destination when a customer asks a question, joins a queue, calls for help or complains about a problem. That encounter is the last mile of branding. It is where the promise becomes believable or falls apart.
Marketing creates expectation. Customer service decides whether that expectation survives contact with reality. A bank may call itself caring, a hospital may promise compassion and a restaurant may project premium service. But customers do not experience slogans. They experience people, processes and responses. An irritated receptionist, an unanswered WhatsApp message or an employee who says, “that is not my department,” can communicate more about a brand than an expensive campaign. Many organisations carefully manage the visible parts of branding while leaving the human parts to chance.
The cost of that mistake is becoming clearer. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 52 per cent of consumers had stopped buying from a brand because of a bad product or service experience. Another 29 per cent had stopped because of poor customer experience. More revealing was the perception gap: 89 per cent of executives believed customer loyalty had improved, but only 39 per cent of consumers agreed. Some organisations may therefore be admiring their brands from the inside while customers are quietly walking away.
In Ghana, this question deserves particular attention. Competition is no longer only about who has the better product. Banks offer similar digital products. Telecom companies provide comparable services. Restaurants can copy menus. Professional firms can imitate websites and presentations. Even attractive packaging is easier to reproduce. What is much harder to copy is a consistently good experience. It is built in small moments: whether someone answers the phone with patience, whether a complaint is owned rather than passed around and whether a mistake is corrected without making the customer beg for attention.
The growing attention to customer service in Ghana reflects this shift. Customer Service Week Ghana and Africa 2026 opens with an international summit in Accra focused on culture, attitude and technology. GCB Bank has also dedicated October to customer appreciation, education and engagement. These are signs that service is moving from a “soft” activity to a serious business issue. The organisations that understand this will stop treating customer service as the job of one department and begin to see it as part of how the whole institution protects its reputation.
Technology makes the last mile even more important. Artificial intelligence, chatbots and automated systems can make service faster, but efficiency is not the same as care. PwC reported that 86 per cent of consumers still consider human interaction essential to their brand experience. Businesses should therefore automate friction, not humanity. A chatbot can answer routine questions at midnight. It should not become a wall that prevents a frustrated customer from reaching a person. Technology should shorten the distance between the customer and a solution.
There is also a new reputational reality. Customer service used to be largely private. Today it can become public in seconds. A poor reply can be screenshotted. A rude encounter can be recorded. A delayed refund can become a social media thread. Frontline employees are therefore not merely service staff; they are reputation managers. Every email, phone call and face-to-face interaction has the potential to become part of the public story of the brand.
For leaders, the implication is simple but demanding. If the advertisement says “we care,” the service system must make caring possible. Staff need training, but they also need authority to solve reasonable problems. Feedback must be collected and acted upon. Response times should be measured. Recurring complaints should be treated as business intelligence. Leaders should occasionally experience their organisations as ordinary customers do because dashboards can hide frustrations that are obvious in a queue, on a phone call or in an unanswered inbox.
Branding does not end when the logo is approved or the campaign goes live. It ends where the customer meets the organisation. Strong brands are not simply recognised; they are trusted. Trust grows through repeated evidence that the organisation will do what it promised, especially when something goes wrong. Customer service is therefore not an accessory to branding. It is the final proof of it. The last mile may be the shortest part of the journey, but it is often the part the customer remembers most.
BY: DR. MRS JULIANA AKUSHIKA ANDOH
SENIOR LECTURER/BRANDWITHDR.ANDOH
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of MG Digital, 3News, or its associates. This content represents the author’s personal perspective and analysis.
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