I have decided that at this juncture some attention should be given to what one might consider to be some of the critical reasons why we continue to face the difficulties that we do in the area of customer service delivery. The key to enhancing the quality of customer service reposes in the creation of an enabling environment. Interestingly, I do not believe that the creation of that environment poses insurmountable challenges. Rather, it depends on how much of an issue good customer service is for us and how keen we are to improve the quality of customer service.
One of the points that I have sought to make during the course of this series is that problems associated with the trend of poor customer service in Guyana are simple yet complex and that improving the quality of customer service has to do with the issue of will, that is, how desperately we seek change and how much we are prepared to do to bring about that change. Personally, I believe that change is eminently possible. It depends on whether or not we really want that change and how important we perceive change to be in the broader context of improving the quality of our lives as a people. Herein lies the complexity.
The available evidence would appear to suggest that improving the quality of customer service is nowhere near the front burner on the list of national priorities. One need only look at the official dilatoriness in giving effect to enabling consumer protection legislation and it becomes clear that as a nation we are really not as serious about high standards of customer service as we ought to be. We talk ceaselessly about our poor consumer protection and customer service standards but, sadly, there is manifest evidence that we are decidedly not prepared to create the building blocks that are necessary to improve those standards.
Leadership
As in every other area of national endeavour, official leadership, that is the leadership provided by government and its agencies and by interest groups in the private sector and in civil society are critical to the realization of national goals. By neglecting to give effect to the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act that government has been deficient in providing effective leadership in the quest for enhanced customer service standards. The same can be said for the private sector where, by and large and in the absence of strong laws and national enforcement capacity, the business sector and its umbrella organizations have neglected either to pursue an effective lobby for the enactment of those laws or to institute a regime of self-regulation that allows for the institution of higher consumer service standards even in the absence of enabling legislation. Sadly, the argument that attends the delinquency of the private sector suggests that stricter consumer protection legislation is likely to undermine a prevailing commercial culture that has long been thoroughly unmindful of consumer rights and of the virtues of higher standards of customer service. The available evidence suggests beyond any reasonable doubt that moral suasion is far from enough to bring about higher standards of customer service.
The role of NGO’s, Pressure Groups et al
Public pressure for higher standards of customer service and measures to ensure effective consumer protection has become, in the main, the responsibility of organizations concerned specifically with issues of consumer protection. The problem with these types of organizations is that they are lacking in any strong foundation in either public or institutional support. Government, particularly, continues to be unmindful of the lobby efforts of these kinds of organizations apart from which their efforts are often stymied by a lack of effective media support and an absence of material resources with which to raise the intensity of their lobby to a point where it secures sustained public support.
The role of consumers
Consumers, of course, are not a homogenous whole and while they have the advantage of numbers they lack the cohesion and collective will that derives from the absence of institutions within which they can be infused with common cause. Setting aside the absence of effective umbrella organizations, I have already stated that, as a whole, the Guyanese consuming public has become steeped in a culture of acceptance of poor service standards from both private sector and public sector organizations. Apart from an inexplicable intimidation by what is often the coarse officialdom that often emanates from state service institutions, we appear reluctant to insist on rights being wronged in our engagements with the commercial sector even in cases where the alternatives could mean the needles incurring of financial loss.
Public awareness and consumer service standards
The fact that there is no national agency that Has assumed serious responsibility for consumer education – and here I include the government Ministry responsible for Consumer Protection – has meant that, by and large, consumers are seriously lacking in any real awareness of their rights as customers. This, arguably, has contributed to the creation of a posture of defensiveness whenever they are confronted with instances in which their rights are being transgressed. My own cursory reading of the yet to be implemented Consumer Protection Act tells me that its contents address a number of key issues relating to issues of customer service and consumer rights which are well worth disseminating to the consuming public. In matters of consumer protection and customer service the law serves as perhaps the firmest foundation on which the consumer can stand and I strongly suspect that much more pressure will be brought to bear for higher standards of customer service if the customer has a greater awareness of what his or her rights are.
Service Providers
Because we continue to take for granted the importance of providing what are generally felt to be mundane public services like those associated with the jobs of shop assistants and clerical functionaries at both state and non-state institutions, little attention is paid to recruitment policies that ensure that, as far as possible, we find the correct people for the job. There appears to exist an assumption among recruitment and Human Resources personnel that these kinds of ‘front line’ service-type jobs require minimal skills.
The upshot of this has been that less than careful attention is paid to recruitment policies, approaches to interviewing applicants take little if any account of the suitability of dispositions and poor remuneration has the effect of sending a clear message that these ‘front-line’ service providers rate pretty lowly in the context of the organizational pecking order. In effect, far too many of our ‘front-line’ service providers in both the public and private sectors are under-qualified and temperamentally unsuited for the jobs that they are asked to do. Moreover their pay levels and perceptions of their own importance in the broader scheme of things render them under-motivated, disinterested and blissfully unaware of their own importance as the face of the organizations that they serve.
This of course has much to do with a point that I made in an earlier installment about the nexus between good frontline customer service and the profitability (in the case of the commercial sector) and the image (in the case of the state service sector). The problem that we face here in Guyana is that by and large these axioms simply do not apply. In the case of the commercial sector the lack of mindfulness with good customer service has to do with the fact that there is no real nexus between individual customer loyalty and the financial fortunes of the particular enterprise. The situation is even more glaring in the cases of the state enterprises where customers must ensure even the most extreme experiences of consumer abuse since there is no alternative entity from which they can secure the particular service.
Training
Taken in isolation, training on its own is far from the answer to the problem of low standards of customer service. Training is important but it has to be fitted with a broader paradigm of a structured approach to improving good customer service standards. Efforts at training – particularly within the state service sector – are often driven much more by considerations of public image than by any real desire to improve customer service standards. There are some glaring examples of state institutions in which what is disseminated through training often runs counter to institutionalized customs and practices that foster practices like graft and corruption. Attempts at corrective measures through training cannot, on their own, hope to eradicate practices which have become deep and ingrained, are finically lucrative for the beneficiaries and which, in some instances, are driven by people in high authority. In these instances, training is purely a matter of transparent window-dressing and an even further waste of resources.
The second point which I wish to make about customer service training is that targeted as it usually is at front-line, low level staff it is frequently confronted with challenges associated with the fact that the trainees, having regard to their substantive backgrounds and levels of education, are often less than receptive to such training. The problem in these cases is hardly the fault of the trainees. It has to do, in the first instance, with flawed recruitment policies that are underpinned by equally flawed assumptions about the importance of “front-line’ service-provision jobs and by a failure to recognize that training for such jobs comprises not only a formal, classroom type of orientation but also, the creation within the organization of a broader environment that imbues the employee of a sense of the importance of what he or she does.
What the over-reliance on conventional consumer service training has done is to create one-size-fits-all training templates that often seek to apply one or a few curriculum-based training approaches to most if not all situations. If training is to be effective the models that are applied must derive directly from the nature of the entities that they are required to serve. Moreover, they must be flexible, practical and must, among other things, imbue the trainees with a sense of the nexus between the acquisition of knowledge and the practical on-the-job application of that knowledge. In this context it should be noted that such training must also address the removal of those institutional obstacles to the application of training.
