The hidden quality crisis in Nigeria’s AI customer service

By: Adelola Adeoti

A few weeks ago, Adanna tried to resolve a failed online payment with her bank. Instead of the usual queue at a physical branch, she opened her bank’s WhatsApp chatbot, hoping for a quick fix.

Ten minutes later, she was still stuck in a loop of automated responses, none of which addressed her actual problem. Frustrated, she gave up and joined the physical queue she was trying to avoid in the first place.

Adanna’s story isn’t unique. From banking apps to telecoms customer service, Nigerians are increasingly forced to talk to bots that promise instant answers, but often deliver generic replies, dead ends, or worse, wrong advice.

Yet, behind the shiny promise of “AI-driven convenience” lies an uncomfortable truth: many of these bots simply don’t work as they should. And the reason isn’t just poor design, its poor quality assurance.

Across Nigeria’s booming digital economy, companies are racing to plug artificial intelligence into customer support. The goal is clear: save time and handle more customers at scale. But in the rush, a critical step is often skipped: rigorous testing.

Chatbots rely on a mix of machine learning models and integrations with core banking or telecom systems. Each piece can break or misfire. Without thorough Quality Assurance (QA), that process of testing, refining, and validating that these systems work in real-life scenarios, users become guinea pigs.

And when bots fail, the damage isn’t just an inconvenience. Wrong instructions can cost money, leak personal data, or push frustrated customers straight into the arms of a competitor with better service.

In the industry, in the past year alone, I’ve heard countless stories: a chatbot that transferred a customer to the wrong department, or a telecom bot that failed to register a SIM.

One bank customer spent days battling an AI agent that couldn’t verify a blocked account, only to discover later that the bot had confused the problem for a loan request. Multiply that confusion by thousands of daily users, and you see the scale of frustration.

Yet, most businesses still treat chatbot testing as an afterthought. The priority is to launch, not to perfect. But a half-baked AI agent doesn’t save time, it wastes it. Worse, it damages trust.

In countries where AI customer service is more mature, companies invest in AI QA specialists, those professionals who check for bias and edge cases that typical tests miss. They run bots through thousands of “what if” scenarios: What if the user has poor grammar? What if they switch languages mid-query? What if they ask something the bot’s script didn’t anticipate?

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This testing is tedious, but essential. Without it, bots can’t adapt to real Nigerian customers, who might mix Pidgin and English, use slang, or type on the go with typos galore.

If your chatbot keeps failing, your human support teams still bear the brunt. If your support teams can’t help, your customers walk away. That’s revenue lost and reputation damaged.

Nigerian businesses love to say “tech is the future.” But bad AI isn’t the future anyone wants. It’s time for leaders, especially in banking and fintech, to see QA not as an optional step, but as the backbone of trust.

Building bots people actually want to use means investing in people behind the scenes: quality engineers, language testers, and local context experts. It means constant feedback loops and real accountability for when the bots get it wrong.

In the race to automate, let’s not forget the human test: Is this bot actually helping the customer? If the answer is no, it’s back to the test lab.

For millions of Nigerians, customer service shouldn’t feel like arguing with a brick wall that talks back. We deserve better bots — and that starts with better testing.

Adelola, a Quality Assurance and Java Engineer, and an advocate for stronger tech standards in Africa’s growing digital economy, sent this from Lagos.