(First appeared in Consumer News Namibia Magazine March 2013)
I have been
plagued in the past few weeks with the bad level of service I received from
companies around Namibia. It has gone from a restaurant which brought the
starters (oysters) twenty minutes after the main course had arrived, (the main
course was a medium-done steak and should have taken much longer than shelling
oysters), to a telephone call to a bank to request their latest home loan rates
and I was informed that the person dealing with that type of enquiry is not answering
their phone.
This led me
to look again at what service is, and more importantly how do we go about
creating a “service culture” in the country.
Allow me to
first define the words Service and Culture.
For me the
word SERVICE is “performing work for someone else”. Culture is defined as the
“total inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which constitute the
shared bases of social action.”
Looking at
these meanings we look at the key messages to found within these two words,
namely
- Inherited
- Shared
- Values
- Knowledge
- Perform work for someone else
This is the
message we need to make part of our normal everyday lives. As Namibians we must
strive to implant a Service Culture as a “lasting inheritance of shared
wisdom.” This working together will make the end result far greater than the
sum of individual contributions.
So how do
you become part of creating this Service Culture? Or more importantly, why do
you as a customer also have to play a part in encouraging the Service Culture.
During
Apartheid, one of the important weapons used by activists was the “consumer
boycott”.
A Consumer boycott means a boycott adopted by consumers of both product
and services to express their displeasure with the seller, manufacturer, or
provider. Sometimes, customers may refuse to purchase a particular product in
order to show their dissatisfaction to the excessive price or offensive action
of a particular manufacturer or producer.
At this
point is also important to balance what part the Service Culture plays from the
employees to us as customers, and how much of the Service Culture is influenced
by the relationship between the employer and their employees.
So, if a
company or service supplier provides me with employees who treat me badly or
with slow service, I must differentiate between the service being done to me
(is it personal) or is it a business culture within that business.
I have
looked again at the service provided to me by the restaurant in my opening
paragraph. This same restaurant was in the news less than two days later as the
owner had fired a staff member for eating leftover food. For those of you who
work in the hospitality industry, you know how unappetizing the food at your
own workplace becomes, what still to say of the leftovers you see being thrown
every day? Looking more closely at the restaurant and the way the owners are
reported to treat their workers, I will boycott such a business until they
improve their treatment of their employees – which will surely bring about an
improved customer service.
Sometimes
bad service must lead to a moral purchasing decision by a consumer. Yes, that
means I will rather go without your product or service until such time as the
relationship between employer, employee and myself becomes something worthy and
part of our shared Namibian Service Culture.
