The need for Pakistani firms to be ‘customer obsessed’

Pakistan will frustrate you, test you, and then, somehow, force you to build a business just to survive it.

Here, customer service isn’t just lacking; it’s an afterthought. We’re generations behind what the West considers standard.

Take the time I booked a Careem to send medicines from my house to my office urgently. Midway, the trip was mysteriously marked “completed,” and the rider vanished. I stood outside my office, phone in hand, helpless and frustrated, wondering why something so simple had to be this hard.

Or the day I typed “Sensodyne Extra Soft toothbrush” into a popular e-commerce marketplace, only to be served listings for cat litter and Surf Excel.

These aren’t just daily annoyances; they’re symptoms of a deeper problem: a gap in reliability, efficiency, and basic respect for the customer. Or as my father likes to say, “We struggle with basic insaaniyat in this country.”

Farmaish was born to close that gap. But some days, the stakes were much higher than a missed delivery or a dropped call. I’ve lost count of the frantic requests for life-saving medication, urgent grocery runs for housebound parents, and last-minute gifts that had to arrive before a birthday dinner. In Pakistan, convenience isn’t a luxury. It’s a basic necessity.

Running Farmaish has meant becoming part problem-solver, part negotiator, and part miracle worker. We’ve chased down the weird, the wonderful, and the wildly specific, delivering to addresses that start with “near the big tree” and end with “ask for Rashid bhai.” It’s exhausting, yes, but when a customer’s relief turns into gratitude, when they say, “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you,” it’s worth it.

I started Farmaish five years ago with one goal: to give customers the respect they deserve. Along the way, I landed on a simple truth - customer obsession is the product.

Someone once told me, “As long as a company has a customer, it will live to fight another day.” I’ve taken that one step further: if you serve that customer like no one else can, you don’t just live to fight… you win. From 2007 to 2019, I lived in Canada - studying, working, and watching the e-commerce revolution reshape daily life. Amazon went from “one of the sites I check” to me becoming an Amazon Prime Subscriber. They won my loyalty for three reasons:

● Discovery: If it existed, I could find it instantly.

● Fair pricing: I never felt cheated.

● Delivery: Whatever I wanted arrived within 12–48 hours.

And when things went wrong, and things can always go wrong, I could speak to a real, empathetic human in under 30 seconds - someone empowered to fix the problem.

Amazon didn’t just call itself “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” They lived it. Then I moved back to Pakistan, where the customer is lucky to be an afterthought. On most platforms, if something went wrong, there was rarely a human you could talk to.

Your only options were to fire off an email and hope for a reply, or rant publicly on LinkedIn or Facebook in the hopes of shaming someone into action. Don’t even get me started on the chatbots. Many support teams weren’t trained to listen, let alone solve problems.

COVID took this from frustrating to infuriating. Essentials were sold at outrageous prices. Counterfeits flooded the market, “meltblown” masks without a shred of meltblown filter, sanitizers that smelled like they’d been mixed in a paint shop.

The challenges were obvious:

● Products were hard to find

● Authentic ones were even harder

● Delivery coverage was limited

● Pricing often depended on your accent or the clothes you were wearing, rather than a MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price).

Here, customer service wasn’t the heartbeat of a business, it was a marketing gimmick, rolled out only when convenient. Frustration turned into brainstorming. Examining local commerce from first principles, I identified three core problems: accountability, reliability, and transparency. If we could fix those, we could change everything.

I launched Farmaish in June 2020 as a straight-up jugaad, nothing more than an Instagram page, a Facebook page, a WhatsApp number, me, and a single rider. Our tagline said it all: ‘Think it. Want it. Get it.’

Customers told us what they needed, and we’d find it, buy it, and deliver it, keeping them updated every step of the way - charging 10% commission on top of total value of products ordered, plus delivery charges.

For the first year, I onboarded every customer, pitching Farmaish over text messages, voice notes, and phone calls.

From day one, we decided great customer service had to be our heartbeat. That included how we treated our team: take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your customers.

I had two rules: Trust can’t be bought, only earned. And never take on more demand than you can deliver.

Canada had taught me to underpromise and overdeliver. Y Combinator had taught me something sharper: a startup’s goal is to make something users love - not like, but love. That became our north star.

As the orders piled up, the real lessons weren’t in what we delivered but in what we had to navigate: an unstable supply chain, supplier cartels engineering “shortages” to hike prices, and costs that shifted by the hour. Some days we were detectives; others, negotiators; occasionally, vigilantes - doing whatever it took to get customers what they needed.

A year in, I realised we’d run the whole operation on Google Sheets. In that time, we’d fulfilled thousands of orders ranging from 13 air-conditioning units for a corporate client to checking in on an overseas customer’s parents because he hadn’t heard from them in days.

One of our regular clients messaged us from abroad asking us to send groceries to his parents in Karachi. When we arrived, they mentioned their fridge had died. We didn’t just drop the groceries; we sourced a new fridge, got it delivered, and had it installed before dinner. That customer hasn’t ordered from anywhere else since.

We usually tend to overcomplicate customer service until it ends up becoming just a policy. But great customer service is a feeling, the certainty that the other person genuinely cares about you and your problem, without judgment or impatience. You can’t fake that. It has to be lived, every single day, until it’s part of your DNA.

At Farmaish, that meant building a culture around one hard question: How do you get people to care? For us, the answer started with a human-first approach: understanding our customers’ lives, struggles, and fears, and working exceptionally hard to support them.

We sourced from across Pakistan, delivered within promised timelines, and cracked positive unit economics - all without spending a single rupee on marketing. At one point, I was told I perfectly fit the “Wapistani” profile and should raise funding. I tried. But I quickly realised investors and I were speaking different languages. They wanted hockey-stick growth, whereas I believe that’s not how it works. Your job is to build extraordinary value for customers first. The revenue, growth, and valuation are all byproducts of value creation.

Five years of running a service-driven business in Pakistan have taught me one thing: our real deficit isn’t technology or capital, it’s mindset.

We treat customer service as an afterthought. In much of the world, it’s the foundation, the reason customers return and companies thrive. If we want to excel as a society, we have to stop accepting the bare minimum. We need to build systems that are accountable, reliable, and transparent, whether you’re running an e-commerce store, a hospital, a repair shop, or a government office. That means training people not just to follow scripts, but to listen, empathise, and act. It means pricing fairly, delivering on promises, and taking ownership when things go wrong.

Because when service improves, trust improves. And when trust improves, growth, innovation, and opportunity follows.

In a trust-deficit, price-sensitive market like ours, the only thing that truly wins is customer obsession. And the truth is, every single business here - from milk delivery to dhobis, chai walas to tyre repair shops, could level up simply by showing up honestly for their customers.You don’t need a pitch deck or billions in funding to get started. All you need is the will to serve, a WhatsApp number, a lot of heart, and a lot of hustle.

The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.