The call came in at 6:30 pm on December 24. 2024
The office lights were already dim. A few agents had logged off early to catch matatus upcountry. Others were counting minutes, eyes flicking between the clock and the screen, thinking about nyama choma waiting at home, children waiting with questions, buses waiting with engines running.
Then the phone rang.
Not loudly.
Urgently.
The kind of call an experienced agent recognizes before a single word is spoken.
Fast breathing.
A voice trying not to crack.
That pause at the beginning — the one that says, “I don’t know who else to call.”
“Please… is there anything you can do?”
The caller was a woman in Kayole, calling from her brother’s phone. Her voice was calm, but only because she was holding herself together with effort.
She wasn’t calling about a discount.
She wasn’t calling to complain.
She was calling because every Christmas gift for her children was locked inside a supermarket warehouse in town.
She had used a lay-by plan at a major retailer in Nairobi. She’d paid in installments over weeks. That morning, she sent the final amount via mobile money.
But the payment had gone through after the daily reconciliation cutoff.
The system hadn’t reflected it.
The store wouldn’t release the goods without confirmation.
Christmas Eve.
No supervisors.
No manual overrides.
No tomorrow.
For a family that had already endured a hard year — casual work drying up, a move back into a shared compound, school fees paid in painful bits — this felt like the moment everything finally collapsed.
Her words were simple.
“I promised them. I told them Christmas would be okay.”
The system was closed. The need was not.
The agent on the line — let’s call her Aisha — checked everything.
Payment logs.
Reconciliation times.
Escalation paths.
The answer the system gave her was clean and final:
Nothing could be done until the next business day.
The “right” response would have been easy:
- explain the cutoff
- apologise sincerely
- advise the caller to return on the 27th
Many calls end there.
But Christmas does not wait for business days
A choice every agent knows — but rarely gets to make
Aisha didn’t promise anything.
She didn’t break protocol.
She said one sentence instead:
“Let me see what is still possible.”
She called the store.
No manager on duty.
She called the payments team. Reconciliation had closed.
She called her supervisor.
Approval limits were tight — but discretion existed.
So she did something that great contact centers train for but don’t always allow.
She stayed.
She stayed on the phone.
She stayed with the problem.
She stayed past the clock.
One phone. One workaround. One yes where policy said no.
After almost an hour of back-and-forth, Aisha built a solution that wasn’t in any script.
The company could not reverse the mobile payment in time.
But they could issue digital gift vouchers immediately.
If the store agreed to accept the vouchers as settlement for the lay-by — even though it was not standard practice — the goods could be released.
It required:
- persuasion
- trust
- a manager willing to bend just enough
- and an agent willing to own the outcome
At 8:12 pm, the vouchers were issued.
At 8:26 pm, the store manager agreed.
The caller didn’t cry.
She laughed.
That kind of laugh that comes when panic finally leaves the body.
Christmas morning
The gifts were collected that night.
Wrapped quietly.
Placed under a borrowed tree.
Opened the next morning by children who would never know how close Christmas came to disappearing.
For them, Christmas simply arrived.
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