I work in customer experience in a bank, and much of my work is about making things simple: fewer steps, shorter waits, clearer answers. But in banking, simple is not enough. What makes service easy can also make fraud easy.
That is why October feels like one conversation to me. The first week is Customer Service Week. The whole month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. One thanks the people who serve us; the other reminds us to stay safe. Both are about trust.
Think about what we like in a great service person: kind, fast, eager to help, slow to say no. Now think about what a scammer needs: exactly the same. Most fraud today does not break into systems. It tricks people, with a caller who "lost his phone," or a message that claims to be from your bank or mobile money provider.
This does not mean we should be less kind. It means we must understand what real kindness is.
The pause is part of the service
When someone opens a new account, the bank must make sure they are who they say they are. Most of this checking happens automatically, in seconds. But sometimes the check fails and an agent must verify by hand, while the customer is in a hurry and the queue is long.
In that moment, the agent who takes a few more minutes looks slow. Until the day the "customer" was not who they said, and those minutes protected both the bank and real customers.
That pause is not bad service. It is service at its best.
Yet many of the numbers we track reward speed, not safety. None of them counts the check that stopped an account from being opened in someone else's name. If we reward only speed, we teach our teams that the pause is a mistake. So, I keep asking: how do you measure a fraud that never happened?
Security needs translating too.
Security words often sound cold: "Verification required." "Policy does not allow." But the real message behind them is care; it just has not been translated.
Banks have said "we will never ask for your PIN" for years, often in small print. Said clearly and kindly, it becomes a sentence customer remember: "We will never ask for your PIN or your code. Not by call, not by SMS, not by WhatsApp. If someone does, it is not us."
Customers have changed.
Customers today know their value and their rights. They will not accept a service that is easy but unsafe, or safe but tiring. They want both, and they are right.
For leaders, this means training teams to notice how tricks sound, and letting agents pause without punishing them on their numbers. For agents: a real customer can wait two minutes; a scammer usually cannot. For all of us: never share your PIN or one-time code with anyone.
Customer Service Week should not be the only time we thank the people who serve us, including those who check our details and the security teams we never see. Trust is built slowly, in small moments, and it can be lost in one.
The writer is an International Coaching Federation (ICF) certified coach and banking professional at the Bank of Kigali.