The popular marketing adage that image is everything has assumed an increasingly poignant significance in what has become a ferociously competitive global business environment. What this global competition has engendered is a search by businesses for a competitive edge that goes beyond product quality and lower prices and focuses on the creation of an environment in which consumer care is afforded greater priority The theory at work here is that consumers are as concerned about a feel good environment in which high standards of courtesy and comfort are in evidence as they are about the cost and quality of the goods and service that they seek.
Emphasis on higher standards of consumer service in the global business sector has led to increased investment in human resource management and in the creation of internal training programmes for service staff. In the United States, particularly, universities and other institutions of learning have responded to the increased demand for staff training in the business sector by creating training programmes tailored to meet the particular needs of the sector. At the same time human resource and customer service executives command high salaries and positions of particular influence in several of the major business enterprises in North America and Europe.
While global trends point increasingly in the direction of higher standards of customer service as a critical tool in the race for competitive advantage, the local business community remains seemingly oblivious to the need to raise standards at home. Indeed, the evidence in both the service and trading sectors suggests that little emphasis is placed on the training of front line staff to meet higher standards of consumer service. In the retail sector, for example, where low wages attract mostly early school leavers and where little if any effort is made by proprietors to provide even rudimentary in-service training in customer care, the problem has drifted in the direction of crisis proportions. Coarse, unpleasant shop assistants and counter staff, untrained in even the most rudimentary communication skills are a prominent feature even in some of the larger business establishments and few people appear to give ‘two hoots’ about the problem.
Part of the reason why low standards of customer service have gone unattended in the business sector is that customers themselves frequently display an impaired sense of their right to a higher quality of service, a circumstance that has resulted in the institutionalization of the coarseness, indifference and, sometimes, downright rudeness on the part of service staff in several business places. The few complaints that are made about poor customer service are invariably responded to with the excuse that good help is hard to find.
Of course, what owners of some businesses never seem to take into account is the fact that efficient customer service can actually be realized through the setting of high standards and investing in the training necessary to ensure that employees are aware of those standards and are capable of reaching them. The truth is that there are few national laws or consumer service standards that place the business sector under any real pressure to conform to high standards of consumer care.
One would expect that umbrella bodies like the Private Sector Commission (PSC), the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and the various regional Chambers would seek to initiate and support efforts to realize higher standards of consumer service in the business sector. Sadly, there is no real evidence that this has been the case.
Of course, while low standards of consumer care continue to go largely unnoticed in cases where the market is a predominantly domestic one, services like the tourism and banking sectors whose clientele include more informed consumers and whose service quality is judged by international standards are under greater pressure to provide higher standards of customer care.
While the banking sector has had greater experience in responding to higher customer expectations, the relatively new tourism sector continues to struggle to cope with the need to match the standards that seasoned travellers have come to expect. In this regard neither the operators in the tourist sector – with a few exceptions – nor the state-run Guyana Tourism Authority have sought to take any meaningful steps, through training, to improve the level of customer service in the industry.
By failing to place emphasis on high standards of customer service, the business community is actually shooting itself in the foot since sooner or later many of the smaller, weaker business entities will be run out of town by competition – perhaps from elsewhere in the region that can offer the same goods and services accompanied with higher standards of customer service.
