With Cricket World Cup coming in a few months, our businesses customer service will be tested for the first time by the international community on a large scale.
As part of our preparation, our companies should define “customers” and “service” for their employees. Customer service can be good or bad. I would define good customer service as listening, understanding every customer’s concerns, and acting promptly and reasonably to resolve every customer’s problems and questions to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction. Above all else, your employee should project a pleasant and courteous manner. Customer service is always important because if your company doesn’t service your customers properly, they will go somewhere else.
Some of the concerns all our businesses must be cognizant of are our slang. Would our visitors understand what they mean? For example:
* “you getting thru dey?”
* “coming”
* “Wah u want?”
* When someone asks for the supervisor, the answer is always “He nah cum in to work yet”
The international customers will not understand these statements. These are just some examples of where we need to start training our staff on how to interact with a different breed of customers.
We have to get the entire company involved in good service by creating standards of customer service. At the end of the day the goal is to bring the customer back. Customer service must come from top down; meaning, owners and managers must get involved. As company owners, you cannot expect your employees to treat your customers well if you don’t treat them well first.
It is not just our stores that must be focused on customer service but many of our government agencies also. From our immigration service, which sometimes acts like it is their job to make visitors feel they are unwanted in our country. For example when you are leaving the country and have to go pay the departure tax early in the morning, you do not even receive a greeting, just “$4500.00”, it is the coldest part of leaving our country. One other time I was leaving Guyana, and the immigration officer told my family not to step over the line in a very harsh way, when I looked down, there was no line, maybe twenty years ago there was a line there.
Another place many visitors go is to the Post Office, either to buy stamps or most times to buy collectors’ stamps. The cumbersome process of buying these stamps will make anyone frustrated and probably decide it’s not worth the bother which equates to loss of revenues to the national treasury.
Keeping promises to customers is also an important aspect of our success, and our ability to retain customers depends on the positive relationship our employees build with our customers. That’s why we must keep our employees foremost in our thinking.
We must learn also to keep track of customers and their needs. No company in Guyana that I have come across does any direct marketing with their customers. For example, if I buy a phone at Wireless and 6 months later there is an upgrade to the model I bought, it would benefit the company to send me a letter informing me of this to see if I may want to upgrade. It’s the little things make a customer return. Good customer service means that your customers will be more likely to continue to do business with your company.
As we move into this critical season, even though, according to many reports, Guyana lags significantly behind ticket sales for Cricket World Cup, we need to do what it takes to become more service oriented in all areas. Until next week “Roop”
