Making service orientation a national culture
By Jacquelyn Hamer
Perfecting the practice of giving service requires both a level of technical training in the methodologies associated with the delivery of the particular service and, equally important, a disposition towards giving service. I have found that the latter requirement is often ignored and that people are often trained on the assumption that they will simply do what they are taught to do. There are people who resent the idea of giving service, in many cases because they equate giving service with being placed in a position of servitude. They fail to see any merit in the roles that they play. This, I believe, derives from a wider environment in which there is an absence of what I will call a service culture.
I define a service culture as an environment or a society in which people value the practice of facilitating or addressing other people’s needs. Professionals like nurses, policemen and women, teachers, postmen and women are among those who are likely to have a much keener sense of what a service culture is. Giving service lies at the very core of those professions and when you truly immerse yourself in the pursuits of those professions, giving service and watching the service that you give impact positively on people’s lives becomes an end in itself. In such cases you do what you do because you are charged with responding to a considerable and important public need and the satisfaction of that need becomes an end in itself. In other words, in such situations, personal commitment becomes an inherent part of perfecting a positive disposition to good customer service.
What helps in the shaping of that positive disposition is the presence or otherwise of what I will describe as an enabling environment. To seek to develop and implement a customer service regime in an environment that is, in itself, hostile to the very idea of good customer service is to indulge in counterproductive self-delusion. By this I mean that where there is an absence of a service culture that is rooted in the organization and driven by an institutionalized code of practice to which the particular service entity thoroughly subscribes, training in customer service that seeks simply to teach people how what is done is done is unlikely to make any significant impact.
Previously, I have made reference to service providers, merchants, vendors – call them what you will – whose entire personal outlook is shaped by the maximization of profit and who regard consumers as no more than vehicles through which that end objective can be realized. If that outlook is imbued in the leadership of the entity it inevitably becomes company policy. In other words, the expectation of the owner or manager is that the lesser operatives will perform their duties in a manner that is consistent with those objectives. Not only is such a business owner unlikely to seek to expose his or her employees to customer service training; more than that, those employees who might be inclined to provide a good service are likely to learn very quickly that if they wish to keep their jobs they will have to find a way to dispense with their proclivity for providing good customer service. In fact, I have heard of cases in which employees have claimed that they were victimized for refusing to commit acts which they considered to be inimical to the interests of consumers.
At the heart of our own customer service problems in Guyana is the absence of a universal culture of a recognition and enforcement of customer either at the level of public or private sector institutions, as a whole. Service entities, particularly those in public sector, often appear far more preoccupied with ensuring that the rules are followed and render them sufficiently tedious and cumbersome as to make a living hell of the lives of people who seek to secure those services. The other fatal flaw in our service culture is that some key service institutions are infested with the taint of corrupt practices driven by individual motives of greed and selfishness that run like rivers through those organizations. Service-providers in some well-known public entities are driven not by a commitment to giving service but to by how they can profit from what they do. The idea of serving the customer becomes subsumed beneath what the customer can and will do for them in exchange for that service. Profiting from providing service has become a particular preoccupation in some entities.
Customer Service Training is likely to bring little real benefit to organizations that are infested by corrupt practices since it is not a question of the functionaries not understanding how to deliver a service but a matter of being part of a culture that places a far greater priority on securing returns rather than on giving service. You can train all you want, if the practices that govern the running of an institution are biased towards needlessly complicating procedures in order to facilitate bribes and kickbacks then that training becomes a waste of effort. Moreover, good practices among a minority of service-providers in institutions where bad practices are the done thing – so to speak – are likely to create difficult situations for the do-gooders who – in cases of corrupt organizations – are usually accused of cutting up runnings, or, to put it bluntly, undermining the prevailing culture of corruption.
Efforts to infuse a culture of good customer service within some state-run service institutions are more than likely not to succeed, therefore, unless the cancer of corrupt practices that has long infested those institutions is surgically removed and a complete re-orientation that makes honesty and integrity the very creed of those institutions created.
Recently, I read an insightful comment in this very newspaper by the President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry about corruption and some of the reasons why it persists. The point that he was seeking to make has to do with the tendency towards locating authority in the hands of individuals rather than within systems and procedures. He spoke about the need for transparency in the conduct of transactions in public agencies, pointing out that there are cases within the state bureaucracy in which the provision authority for the provision of important services reposes in one individual or a small group of individuals; so that once you locate authority within a narrow circle or with an individual you render it manifestly easier for corrupt practices to be nurtured. Securing those services comes to depend on who you know or whether you are prepared to pay. The fact is that people in whose hands a great deal of authority is placed are often inclined to develop an inflated sense of their own power and seek to utilize that authority for their own benefit and that is often the case in some of our state agencies. Personally, I applaud his insightful perspective which speaks to the need to make fundamental structural changes in the way in which some state institutions are run in order to create a genuine service culture.
Not only do we find people with authority who are inclined to expect, indeed, demand, kickbacks for the services that they provide. No less distressing is the sense of arrogance that they often exude, employing a standard approach of impatience and rudeness in dealing with service-seekers. I have found, too, that many of these upstarts tend, despite their attitudes, to survive customer complaint and protest over protracted periods of time, raising questions as to whether there may not have well-placed protectors who also stand to benefit from ensuring that they remain in their positions of authority.
It starts, in my view, at the top. High level interventions of the state to address corrupt practices are not done as a matter of course. Rather, they occur in the wake of serious outrages like the discovery of major frauds and their purpose appears designed much more to quell public outcry than to realize any real remedial action.. There have been numerous cases in which even officially approved enquiries into operational deficiencies in state institutions the outcomes of which ought to lead either to wholesale sanctions against the offenders and/or improvement in the general customer service regimen leave the status quo intact and the problems largely unresolved. NIS reforms, for example, were intended, at least in part, to render the service more customer-friendly. More than a year later we still await the full and proper implementation of those reforms and the Scheme remains, up to this day, a state service entity that heaps untold frustration on contributors. Sloth in effecting NIS reforms obviously raises questions as to whether or not there is any real commitment to change.
Questions have also been raised about enquiries into problems at state institutions that tend, far too often, to leave the positions of those in authority intact when, in fact, the problems in those institutions have been sufficiently profound so as to cause their own competence to be called into question. There some particularly glaring examples of persons in authority at state institutions whose positions have not been in the least bit threatened despite the fact that the institutions which they manage are replete with serious and repetitive shortcomings including chronic inefficiencies and repetitive corruption-related scandals.
Again, questions arise as to whether the fact that those who lead appear to be untouchable does not send altogether the wrong messages about the commitment of the state to reversing the culture of incompetence, chicanery and disregard for obligation to giving service.
I have read part of the 2009 Report on Global Corruption published by Transparency International and it surprises me little that globally the private sector is very much ‘in bed’ with the state as far as corruption is concerned. A few issues ago the Stabroek Business reported on the shocking fact that business houses pay between US$20 billion and US$40 billion to politicians and public officials every year. The sheer volume of the bribes and kickbacks bespeaks the existence of an entrenched culture of illegal practices which is embedded in the relationship between the state and the private sector. What this means, of course, is that we can look to the private sector to perpetuate the culture of dishonesty in their dealings with consumers, in which case we cannot seriously hope for anything remotely resembling good customer service.
I have deliberately taken the concept of customer service into the realms of honesty and integrity since I wish to make the point – as I have in a previous section – that the two cannot be separated. Enactment of the law is only part of the solution to the problem. We must be prepared to enforce the law and that requires the will and the disposition which, for the moment at least, appear to be absent from the national psyche.
I am uncertain as to what City Mayor Hamilton Green meant when he made his now well-remembered remark about the need for a moral and spiritual revival.. I believe, however, that the genesis of a regimen of good customer service lies in the creation of a sense of service and that that sense of service must be driven by policies shaped and driven by our political leaders. They are the best examples since it is they who must both make the laws and ensure their enforcement.