I have always been a service delivery person even as a young girl. I am impatient with how long it takes a guest to get a drink even in my residence. As a young girl, I got nervous when we were trying to get snacks and drinks to the table. I was the angling nine year-old in my father’s house who put the serviette on the trays and arranged the biscuits around a side plate while placing the peanuts in the centre. I was concerned about how beautiful a setup for service was and how fast it can be delivered to the guests.
Now a full-grown woman, I have carried this in my heart wherever I go. I believe in feedbacks, it tells you whether what you have done is good enough or one requires tweaking of a certain area to make it better. I am all about customer satisfaction. I believe if you are in the marketplace of ideas, or in the business of entrepreneurship, you must always have at the back of your mind your competition as your customer service quotient or success in attracting customers is how good you were in making them return to you or to your ideas.
I am constantly at my wit’s end at airports and service areas. Flights are delayed routinely, hotels cannot explain why housekeeping has no dustbin in your toilet, people tell you that is how they have always done it. Customers are treated shabbily across services nationwide. It befuddles me and some of this service takes little time and just paying more attention. It is attitude and improves your business.
Three years ago, I got the opportunity to work in a service-related area. My posting within the broadcast industry where I have served for over thirty years was to the SERVICOM Unit as head. This meant that I was responsible for service delivery throughout my establishment. Ultimately my role was head, Customer Service. I believed it was God’s challenge to me to do those things I have always complained about properly and create a positive change in that area.
Arriving at the Customer Service desk, I found that it was considered one of those postings for those who have no value to an institution. Every focal officer attached to this position felt they were posted to a place of no challenge and no interest. It began to look to them like they were unwanted. This took a toll on customer service. A whole new mindset needed to be created. This meant that although SERVICOM was largely ignored, I had a duty to make it a place to remember starting from the gate where we consolidated already existing process tags et al. My staff were made to imbibe as a holy grail the importance of the customer. We began to provide newspapers for visitors and other such customer-related services, something that was to be expected in other climes and industries. We began to train young officers to be warm, kind and polite to visitors who came and tired to manage all our visitors in a wholesome manner and efficiently too.
I was in my elements working in this place. In spite of the paucity of funds to do the work, I still gave my best and I returned to my nine-year-old self where I was very much interested in how fast and how pretty service to our visitors at home was.
Today I am a full-grown woman and I am still at that place where I think customer service can be better in Nigeria. Let’s start with service points.
Why in heaven’s name is the point for paying for drugs in a hospital so far away from the pharmacist’s service point? Why should a patient’s relation walk round a hospital because they want to pay for drugs and be traumatized by the distance between all the service points? Why should the feedback point at a service area be upstairs to discourage you from laying your complaint? Why should a flight be delayed three times until you miss your meeting at the other end and yet no one in the company has alerted you of the delay, spoken to you or apologized to you? How come the letter you wrote to an organization for poor service delivery has still not been replied to three months later?
Once I met a lady who said she had complained about the dastardly services of a Nigerian airline in writing. I asked her what they said in their reply, she said they never replied.
“It’s been six months,” she said.
“What do you do?” I asked her.
“I am the Zimbabwean Ambassador to Nigeria,” she answered.
I was dumb-struck.
Finally, why do we have only two service points for an activity like accreditation, paying bills in a boarding school, when the number of persons waiting to pay or be accredited are 105? Could we not have nine service points to make it faster?
I rest my case.
