Customer Service (7)
By Jacquelyn Hamer
Queues are a necessary evil of service provision in both the state and the private sectors. Apart from the fact that where large numbers of people require the same service or set of services simultaneously it becomes necessary for people to wait their turns, we in Guyana are confronted with the problem of having too few outlets for the delivery of some of the most sought-after services. I do not believe that it is always a matter of resources. Sometimes, for no explicable reason there are far too few service outlets.
The ‘season’ of renewals of motor vehicle registration is, for example, a living nightmare and quite why, in this day and age we can do no better than having thousands of people queue for hours outside the Smyth street License Revenue Office to have their registrations renewed is beyond me. Surely, in this day and age when checks and balances can be created through the application of information technology, the Guyana Revenue Authority can have multiple centres for the processing of vehicle licenses.
While I have not troubled myself to count the number of cash dispensing machines which commercial banks have made available it is no secret that these are few and far between – so to speak. On pay days and holidays when there is an increase in the demand for cash people are sometimes required to queue for lengthy periods to withdraw sums of money which it probably takes them less time to spend. On days when cash is in particularly high demand it is by no means unusual to find that the dispensing machines are empty and in the case of one particular commercial bank it takes ages for machines to be replenished.
I mentioned before in a previous article that Guyanese have every reason to dislike queuing. It takes us back to a time that we would rather forget when queuing had become almost an occupational hazard of living in Guyana; and even if the principle of waiting one’s turn requires that there be queues, you tend to judge the efficiency of an organization by the speed with which the length of the queues is reduced.
While very little effort has been made in either the public or the private sector – in the latter case, particularly commercial banks – to reduce waiting time, some entities have evolved what they appear to believe is the ingenious idea of creating elaborate waiting areas………..air-conditioned areas equipped with comfortable chairs, water dispensers and newspapers. The obvious insinuation here is that we may not have been able to do anything about reducing the waiting time but at least we are making your wait as comfortable as we can. Of course people prefer to wait in comfort. However, you can be sure that given a choice between the creature comforts of a comfortable waiting room and shorter waiting time they are more likely than not to choose the latter.
Service entities that are simply content to make people wait do not understand the first thing about good customer service. Because most people are decent and law-abiding they will wait their turn. They, however, do not do so cheerfully; and in cases like banks where the exercise of waiting is repetitive people continually evaluate and re-evaluate the service.
At the risk of attracting the opprobrium of the commercial banks I venture to raise the question as to how much they really do care about good customer service. I have found in my own dealings with commercial banks that it is rarely if ever a question of shaping the rules to suit the customers; rather, it is invariably a matter of the customer having to follow the pre-set rules. Try querying any procedure in any commercial bank in Guyana and you are probably likely to be met with a very polite “Sorry Sir, those are our rules.” The “our” is usually uttered in such a manner as to make it clear that the relationship between the banks and their customers is really a ‘them’ and ‘us’ relationship and that ‘the bank’s rules’ come first.
Whenever this happens, however long you may have had an association with a commercial bank you tend to feel a sense of detachment, a sense that you are simply ‘plugged in’ to a system and that you are powered by that system.
A great many people change cheques in commercial banks. The longest queues are usually occupied by people wishing to change cheques. I have always wondered whether commercial banks ought not to attach greater importance to improving the service to this particular category of customer. These days most people queue up at banks to have their paychecks en-cashed and the next stop is usually the supermarket or the municipal market. For them, standing on tired legs in cavernous air-conditioned buildings, watching other similarly glum faces and painstakingly counting the number of persons ahead of them in an effort to arrive at some rough calculation as to the extent of their wait is no joke. While all this is happening time is going and the supermarkets and the municipal markets are not going to wait forever.
The banks have said that long queues make a case for opening savings accounts and securing ATM cards. The banks need to understand – since apparently they do not – that many people cannot afford the ‘luxury’ of a savings account. In fact, when your circumstances require that you spend money as quickly as you get it bank accounts and ATM cards can be a hindrance. What the banks simply do not understand is that there is really nothing you can do to make long queues acceptable.
Whatever customer service initiatives the commercial banks may seek to take, it would do their respective images a power of good if they were to find practical ways of reducing waiting time. There is simply no way around that.
Perhaps part of the answer may lie in finding further ways of improving the time per teller transaction. I may be wrong but it some times seems to me that every time I go to a commercial bank new, fresh faces peer out at me from behind the teller windows. I wonder where the old faces have disappeared to and am inclined to conclude that the really good tellers, the ones with the shortest time-per-transaction get promoted to other, more senior jobs within the bank and are replaced by new tellers who must now get over all of the nerves and jitters associated with making costly errors before they develop a level of competence that allows them to get their speed up. I do not know whether or not I am right. However, if I am I would want to issue a call for a larger number of experienced tellers so that the time-per-transaction can be reduced and people can spend less time queuing and more them doing the very many other things that they have to do.
When I learnt, recently, that the Guyana Elections Commission was finally ready to distribute national ID cards I thought that the process would involve going along to the relevant centre with the relevant identification to uplift the card. My initial suspicion that I might have been mistaken was confirmed when I learnt subsequently that one form of identity that might be required is the ‘pink slip’ that may have been part of the earlier transaction designed to secure the information for the ID card. Mind you, GECOM had said not a word all those months ago about using the ‘pink slip’ as a form of ID for the collection of the cards and I felt pretty sure that many people would have long disposed of those documents. That aside, I discovered that the process of actually collecting the ID card is actually a three-staged process which involves, first, verifying your identity, secondly, locating your new ID card and finally signing to receive it. I know that it is necessary to take precautions in matters of this kind but, frankly, I consider the process needlessly tedious.
It disturbs me that whether in banks, the License Revenue Office, the Passport Office or elsewhere people have grown accustomed to queuing, often for long hours and sometimes without murmur. More than that it does not appear that the various institutions that provide the services that they seek are aware that some people, perhaps most people, find the very idea of queuing up for what, invariably are simple but essential services, demeaning. We cannot pretend to care about those customers, those service-seekers, when we too, as service-providers, come to accept lengthy queues as the norm with no consideration whatsoever for the imposition that this places on the management of people’s time.
If these institutions are really serious about investing in customer service what they must do is find ways of increasing the number of outlets through which these services are provided. I have already said that the License Revenue Office is a case in point. After all, Customer Service targets the customer and reducing waiting time and, in effect, putting people in a position to better manage their own time is surely an essential element in the enhancement of the quality of service that we provide to our customers.
I believe, too, that what, in these instances, often makes for bad customer service, is the fact that the ‘victims’ – the customers – lack any sense of overt indignation about the poor service standards to which they are subjected. People have said that passivity is a function of a fear of reprisals. I find that hard to accept. If, as would appear to be the case, there is no voluntary inclination on the parts of these institutions – banks, the passport office or wherever – to improve the service that they provide then there is no doubt in my mind that the customers themselves must agitate for change. This is where, I believe we lack a strong customer service lobby, one that is detached from state interests or any other interests for that matter. A strong customer service lobby is more likely than not to influence customer service policy within service institutions so that in designing their customer service training programmes they focus more directly on their own weaknesses and their own limitations and pay greater attention to delivering what the customer wants.
