Part 1

While Poor customer service may be the least of Ghana’s problems at the moment, however, given its impact and importance to Ghana’s competitive edge, I strongly believe it is worth our time to discuss it.

My recent experience in Ghana has led me to the conclusion that Ghanaians have come to accept poor customer service as the norm. It appears from the surface that majority of employees in Ghana have a terrible attitude when it comes to customer service especially public sector employees. It is said that the customer is “king/Queen”, and the customer is always right. However, it appears the concept does not exist in Ghana. For the most part, employees including professionals such as medical officers and lawyers are rude, pompous, arrogant and disrespectful to customers/clients, and it appears they don’t value customers especially Ghanaian owned and operated businesses.

Most people don’t think of public service or government agencies as the model for excellent customer service. There could be many reasons for this perception, ranging from the high volume of customers to the repetitiveness of the job. But if this was true, then restaurants and retail stores would also be perceived as poor service providers because they also have a high volume of customers and perform repetitive tasks, and in general they are not. Some say that public agencies are not motivated to provide good service because they have a captivated audience and lack competition.

So, what is the cause of poor service? People don’t start to work in a new job with a bad attitude. Everyone wants to impress their coworkers and boss, at least initially. So, consider that poor service is learned behavior, just as excellent service is learned. If a company or agency provides poor service to its customers, then delivering poor service must be an option; it must be acceptable to the leadership. But if we want to put good customer service into public service, then good customer service must be a requirement, and poor service cannot be an option. The public must demand the highest possible standard of customer service from the public sector. Poor attitudes must be challenged and head of departments held accountant for the conduct and behavior of their staff.

Whether you are a minister, department head, director, manager, accountant, an inspector, a receptionist, a program director, a medical officer, legal counsel, your customer service attributes and skills are vital to those who rely on your specific job functions. But it takes the collective efforts of everyone on the team to ensure that the needs of the customers served by your agency are met.
The essence of customer service is how you communicate, establish, and manage the relationships with those you serve in meeting their needs at a point of contact. The term relationships refers to the transactions of interactions between you and your customer at any given point of contact. The transaction could be a two-hour staff meeting, or it could be a one-minute conversation with a client who calls with a question or a complaint. It could be a letter you compose to a customer to report the results of an inspection. In other words, customer service is what you deliver and the attitude with which you deliver it at every point of contact. In the world of customer service, each transaction with a customer is prime-time. It is not peripheral to the job; it is not an interruption to the job; it is the job. Customer service always happens; it is either good or bad. Excellent customer service outcomes are never an accident. They result from choices made by management and each individual – so don’t expect what you haven’t planned for. In a public service agency, customer service is the main deliverable, it is the product. Customer service skills and strategies can be taught; customer service attributes cannot. The “wild card” in customer service is the individual.
Today’s competitive business environment rewards companies that offer superior customer service, A simple survey of your own consumer experience may tell you that, in no uncertain terms, getting employees to deliver superior service is no automatic matter. There are several attributes of service that customers uniformly and routinely expect; customers develop their expectations for the future based on current experience dealing with you. It’s important to be consistent when handling the customer’s business. While apologies help to remedy a problem, they can never replace reliable follow through in the first place.
Customers expect you as a supplier to know their business so well that you will bring up important issues even before the customers are aware of them. Taking the initiative to seek out essential information from customers is a mark of service leadership. Thinking and planning from your customer’s point of view helps differentiate you from other competitors. There is a difference between the type of service you provide and the level of service you provide. The type of service provided is determined by the type of job function or transaction being performed. The level of service provided is determined by the individual who provides it. Each person defines the scope and level of service that they’re willing to provide. You can perform the minimum tasks required to complete a transaction with a customer, or you could choose to expand your definition of service.
Courtesy and tact are never simple. Yet, they are among leading factors that brings back customers to a business a second time... Customers want to be sure they are dealing with people who know their product, their business and, especially, how to treat people well. Perhaps most important of all, customers want to know they matter and you are interested in their business. It takes time to understand another person’s point of view. Listening half-heartedly and jumping to conclusions may lead to misinterpretation of a customer’s needs.
Service leadership is made up of many individual parts – all of them delivered by people. The key is to be prepared in advance because it’s difficult to repair damage done, even if it is unintentional. Treating people with value is the foundation for delivering superior customer service in my humble opinion. It is my hope that the next time I visit Ghana I will see improvement in customer service across the board.
God bless Ghana, and long live Ghana!
Komla – The Peace Broker
U.S.A