The Ghanaian and Customer Service

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(Public Agenda (Ghana) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer Peter Drucker.

Mr. Speaker, Honorable majority members, Honorable members of the minority, ladies and gentlemen.

I have been brooding over the position of the customer in our business organizations. I can safely say everyone is a customer, at one time but not everyone can be called a worker or a key figure in an organization. We can say the same for all road users; everyone is a pedestrian, at one time but not everyone is a driver. What this means is that the word customer is without limitations for age, class, position or creed. I think I can safely say that the Ghanaian customer is the least respected in the organizational setting, even though many companies or corporations claim to put the customer at the heart of their operations. Have you been a victim of some rude behavior from an employee of some organization before? I have, and you should have walked the same path to appreciate my concerns in this piece. In our part of the world, the customer experiences gross disrespect from the level of the individual employee to the corporate level.



The phenomenon has been the characteristic of our public sector since Adam and the private sector seems to have joined the fray, and the Ghanaian customer can only gird his/her loins to suffer the more. Many of the employees in the ministries, agencies, and their departments have constantly shown gross disrespect to clients who throng their workplaces to solicit their help. Sometimes, a simple phone call is enough for a client to form all the negative impressions about the behavior of some employees. You go to an office to attempt to meet the boss and you have to wait until all the people who put on suit have had their turns to meet the boss before you are given any audience.

Only God knows what will happen to you if you dare complain that you got to the office before those in suit. Our mindsets have been so brainwashed into thinking that all those who put on such apparels are the more influential or the richer in society, for which reason we have to treat those who depart from this tradition with all the contempt they deserve. It is a fact that we have not as yet (as a country) developed to the point where we can boast of a national language so we assume that the lingua franca for organizational practice in Ghana is the English language, but guess what?, you call the secretary's desk in an organization and she assumes you are Ga or Fanti and begins to speak in a local language with you; you answer back in English (not because you can't speak the language with which she addresses you) and she calls you "too known" and bangs the phone.

The sordid experiences customers have gone through are amazing. These customers usually need nothing more than answers to simple questions or they need to be offered simple services but they have to kowtow before they get help. These employees, on appointment, soon think they are doing the customer huge favors, and without them society will come to a halt. The client is forced to be complicit in this phenomenon because he/she has no alternative areas to seek such services. The usual excuse is poor remuneration, poor pension and retention schemes, among others that prevent them from showing simple levels of courtesy to clients. Courtesy is such a rare commodity in our business practices!

Nepotism and favoritism are to blame. We have the tendency to fill several of our positions with relatives, friends, and other acquaintances. Such workers never feel threatened, even if their behavior is reported to managements of the organizations. If the secretary has intimate moments with the boss what do you expect?

Let's look at the corporate world. Look at the services our cellular companies are giving us? I am getting tired of hearing "the ..number you dialed cannot be reached at this moment" when, in fact, the phone, which is the target of the call has not been switched off. For so many years, the Ghanaian has been assured of a better service but the more he/she waits the more the service degenerates. The situation is not better between phone users of the same company. As for calls from landlines to cellular phones the least said about them the better. Sometime one is told to dial 9...9 or other numbers in addition to the phone number and nothing comes out of that. How should a customer go through such hustle after paying huge sums of money? It is just not fair! I get so frustrated when I have to struggle to get the cherished opportunity to talk to my family in Ghana, sometimes spending an hour just to get through.

Our corporate organizations are taking us for a ride and the Ghanaian is not getting the equivalent of the services he/she has paid for. I am told that cellular phone users who patronize radio and TV text messaging lose more than the two credits (units) they are told, and all this happens on their blind side. The excuse we are given is the never-ending rift between Ghana Telecom and some cellular phone companies but the NCA that is to mediate on behalf of the customer has done little to safeguard the interest of the customer. This is robbery! It is a shame!

A middle-aged woman who had paid for a phone connection from Ghana Telecom had to sit in one of the errand trucks of Ghana Telecom, and it was not after she had refused to get down from the vehicle that workers of the company drove to her place of residence to get the phone connected for her. We can't live in a society with such level of non-performance and lack of respect for client needs and interests. When I pay for some services, I expect that the organization that promised to take care of my interest should not do otherwise. Last week, a Mozambican friend was full of praise for workers of a cellular phone company, here, in the USA, for speedily taking care of a work order she had sent to the company. There isn't much difference between Ghana and the countries of the Western orientation. All the skyscrapers they have, Ghana has; the only big difference is their attitude is their response to work. We have to show some respect for clients who patronize our services.

The main problem with our system is the monopoly some organizations enjoy; they know at the end of the day customers have no other places to go for those services and so no matter how poor their services are, the client will stay. What can disrupt this traditional static order is competition which will give the patron of an organization's service choices to be able decide which one he/she wants. If I feel dissatisfied with some service(s) I should be able to turn elsewhere for an alternative service.

Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media. (allafrica.com)

Copyright 2006 Accra Mail. Distributed by Allafrica Global Media.
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