By Adolph Kpegah, Business Leader and Strategy & Operations Executive at Absa Bank Ghana LTD.

Most Ghanaians no longer judge an organisation by how impressive its offices look or how visible its brand is. They judge it by something far more practical: how quickly it responds, how smoothly things work, and how reliably problems are resolved when they arise. Whether it is a bank processing a transaction, a telecom company restoring service, a utility responding to an outage, or a public institution issuing a document, expectations have shifted decisively.

Public conversations about competitiveness still focus heavily on strategy, innovation, technology, and increasingly, artificial intelligence. These matter, and rightly so. Yet there is an uncomfortable reality we often avoid. Many organisations with ambitious strategies and significant investment still struggle to deliver consistently for customers. The gap is rarely a lack of ideas; across industries, it is becoming clear that execution, not aspiration, is what separates organisations that earn trust from those that merely make promises. In markets where products and pricing are broadly similar, and switching costs are low, the organisation that delivers faster, more reliably, consistently, and with less friction often wins. This is as true for a bank processing a loan as it is for a telecom company resolving a network issue, a utility restoring power, a hospital admitting a patient, or a public agency issuing a permit.

Operational excellence, long treated as a back-office concern, has quietly become a primary source of competitive advantage. The previously unglamorous back-office mechanics of how an organisation actually delivers its service: how requests are processed, how problems are resolved, how long things take, and how often they go wrong, are now at the centre of conversations about competitiveness.

The shift that has already happened

There was a time when scale, physical presence, and brand visibility were the strongest indicators of credibility. In Ghana, the organisation with the most branches, offices, outlets, or service centres and the most mentions in ads was perceived as the safest and most dependable. Visibility created reassurance and was equated with trust.

That logic has not disappeared entirely, but it has weakened considerably. Digital platforms, mobile technology, and self-service channels have changed how customers engage and reduced the importance of physical proximity. Today, many interactions happen without physical contact at all. Customers now interact with organisations through apps, call centres, USSD codes, websites, and digital portals, often without ever stepping into a physical location. The rise of alternative channels such as mobile money, digital payments, e-commerce, and online public services such as passport services, employment portals, and school admission portals has sped up this shift and made performance more visible than presence.

Customers judge organisations less by where they are located and more by how they perform when service is needed. How long does it take to get a response? How many steps are required to complete a request? How often do systems and processes work the first time? When something goes wrong, how quickly is it fixed? These are operational questions, yet they now sit at the centre of competitive reputation, trust, and customer loyalty.

Some still argue that physical reach and brand recognition remain decisive. They do matter, but increasingly, they only get an organisation considered. What determines whether customers stay is how the organisation performs when something needs to be done, fixed, or explained. The basis of competition has shifted from where you are to how well you execute.

Speed is no longer a luxury

Across sectors, customer tolerance for slow and cumbersome processes has declined sharply. This is often dismissed as impatience, but it is more accurately a recalibration of expectations as a result of digital exposure and experiences. People transfer money in seconds, track deliveries in real time, stream content instantly, and receive confirmations immediately. These experiences reset expectations everywhere else.

When a process takes weeks rather than days, or days instead of hours, it feels outdated regardless of the industry. Customers do not interpret it as thoroughness; they perceive it as inefficiency. When they are asked repeatedly for the same information, customers do not see control; they experience incompetence and disorganisation. Importantly, customers do not experience internal explanations. They do not see organisational structures, approval layers, or regulatory interpretations. They experience only the outcome and make decisions based on it.

A common concern is that speed risks errors, weakens controls, or compromises quality. In practice, the opposite is often true. Slow processes are frequently slow because they are unclear, fragmented, or poorly designed. Simplified and well-structured workflows tend to reduce errors, not increase them. Speed, when achieved through good design rather than pressure, is usually a by-product of clarity.

Organisations that perform well have typically done a few things consistently well: simplified processes, removed redundant documentation, reduced handoffs, clarified decision rights, and automated routine tasks. The objective is not to remove people from the process, but to improve employee productivity by ensuring that human effort is focused on judgement, problem-solving, and customer engagement rather than repetitive administrative work.

Reliability is the quiet differentiator

Speed attracts attention, but reliability builds trust and confidence. A fast service that fails unpredictably erodes trust faster than a slower service that works every time. Customers may not comment when systems work, but they remember vividly when they do not. Unplanned downtime, inconsistent outcomes, and unclear resolution timelines train customers to manage risk by avoiding engagement. Customers may tolerate waiting, but they struggle with uncertainty. Reliability creates confidence. It allows customers to plan, to rely on the service, and to stop worrying about whether it will work. This applies equally to financial transactions, mobile networks, power supply, logistics, healthcare, and public services. When systems are stable, processes are consistent, and service levels are predictable, customers notice; even if they do not consciously articulate it.

There is sometimes an assumption that occasional failure is inevitable at scale. To some extent this is true. However, what distinguishes high-performing organisations is not the absence of failure, but how systematically failures are prevented, detected, and addressed. Reliability is not accidental; it is designed. Building reliability at scale requires discipline. It demands investment in systems, clear ownership of processes, performance measurement, and a culture that treats failures as signals for structural improvement rather than isolated incidents to be patched over. It is painstaking work, but it compounds over time into efficiency, reputation, trust, and loyalty.

Simplicity as a design discipline

Complexity rarely arrives by deliberate design. It accumulates gradually as organisations grow, regulations evolve, and exceptions multiply. Each change may be justified in isolation, yet the combined effect is often a process that is difficult to navigate for both employees and customers. New products, new rules, new teams, and new approvals add layers until processes become difficult to navigate internally and frustrating to experience externally.

There is a persistent belief that complexity is a sign of sophistication. In reality, it is often a sign of unmanaged growth. Simplicity, by contrast, requires intent. It requires organisations to regularly ask whether each step in a process still serves a clear purpose. If a step exists only because “that is how it has always been done”, it deserves scrutiny. It means challenging legacy steps, questioning long-standing assumptions, and redesigning processes from the perspective of the user rather than the institution. Simplicity does not mean lowering standards or cutting corners. It means designing processes that achieve the required outcome with the fewest necessary steps, the least ambiguity, and the smallest burden on the customer. Organisations that embed simplicity as a design principle rather than treating it as an occasional clean-up exercise tend to see sustained improvements in speed, cost, employee effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.

The conversation we need to have and what we should focus on

This is not an argument against strategy, innovation, technology, or digital transition. These remain essential and will continue to matter. However, they are not self-executing, and none of them delivers value if the operational foundation is weak. Without strong operational foundations, even the best ideas fail to translate into real value. There is also a temptation to treat operational challenges as technical problems that technology alone will solve. Technology helps, but it does not substitute for clear processes, ownership, and accountability.

Across Ghana’s private and public sectors, the more difficult but necessary conversation is about execution: turnaround times, reliability, and simplicity. These are not back-office metrics. They define lived experience. The organisations that will stand out in the years ahead will not be those with the boldest slogans or the most ambitious plans, but those whose systems work consistently, and well. Some organisations will continue to focus on what they intend to do. Others will focus on how well they actually do it. Increasingly, customers are making their choices based on the latter. Operational excellence is no longer optional. It is how trust is built, reputations are sustained, and competitiveness is earned.

ENDS