SA Service, an international perspective

After just 6 months in the United Kingdom, on a mission to help SA Business Warriors go international, I have just one thing to say: with a single exception, the worst UK service I have experienced is better than the best SA service I have experienced.

Before you drop a gear and start throwing digital raspberries at me, however, may I expand a little because if you’re planning to launch your international empire from here (I am in SA this week) you’re dead in the water if you base your service levels on the likes of Telkom, your cellular (mobile) supplier, or your bank.

Some ideas, just to get you started:

• Do not set up a premium cost line for sales. Most prospects get a tad peeved at having to pay 0861 fees when the international practice is to offer tollfree lines.
  
• If you do choose any Telkom SmartAccess option (0800, 0860, or 0861) premium line option – always quote the SA regular number so that us poor sods not living in paradise can also call you. (Telkom, banks, car hire firms, and cellular suppliers have an almost missionary zeal to stop anybody outside SA talking to them – which we have to try because they ignore the emails we send.)
  
• Answer the phone when it rings. Preferably in the first 10 rings. Even BT manages to do this within 5.
  
• Always allow us poor folk wot are paying your salary an escape route when locked into your interactive telephonic menu, otherwise we will choose the easiest ‘out’ there is: putting the phone down to call a competitor.
  
• Don’t keep telling us we’re important to you. We know your profits are more important – especially if you don’t pay enough staff to answer the phone intelligently. Actions speak louder than words.
  
• Empower the folk on the front line to fix the problem. Give them the systems, or the flexibility, to kill the problem the first time – without passing the buck to Gladys in Accounts, just so that she can tell us why she can’t fix it, and then send us to Anil in Technical, who has no idea why it’s on his desk and we can hear him sweat as he tries to dump us on anyone in Customer Relations (now there is a paradox) before he inadvertently disconnects us as our heart rate approaches terminal levels.
  
• Publish your phone contact details on your website so that we can find you when you have taken our money but not quite delivered that rosy service as envisaged above the small print in your brochure or on your website.
  
• We don’t get too peeved when the product or service doesn’t quite meet the spec. Heck, we can even live with something that’s dead on arrival because we are imminently reasonable beings. But we hate being ignored, lied to, or disconnected in mid-complaint. If you don’t listen to us, expect us to make your life awfully uncomfortable. And we can be very creative if you vex us enough. We want to share our disgust with the world – which means newspapers, radio, email, and forums. Lots of forums.
  
• So, a final word of advice about your service: test it regularly. Pick up the phone and call your own organization pretending to John Wrickenburger and see how comfortable the experience is. (I doubt that the MDs or Telkom, the banks, and the cellphone companies EVER have to do this, but it would be an immense, uncomfortable, experience. Don’t rely on the market surveys because those ones that tell you guys we’re all happy campers are probably the same ones that our government relies on to develop their rosy image of the lack of crime in SA.)

There is one aspect of UK life that explores new lows in service excellence – the National Health Service. The ‘free’ UK medical service is geared to give you as much service as you pay for. Arrive in a new town and call a dentist and you will typically be met with an answering machine that politely assures you that our toothy hero is no longer accepting patients. This would not be a problem if any one of the other practices was accepting new patients. They were not. I am advised that there might be a spot open somewhere in a practice in the outer reaches of Northern Scotland which is a mere 9 hours away. (Maybe service would improve if they saw us as clients rather than patients?)

Each GP office reserves about 3 spaces each day for emergency calls to cater for those situations where your child wakes up at 3 am projectile vomiting his lungs and other body parts. To take advantage of these 3 spaces you must call in at exactly 08h30. (Not 08h29 because the phone will just ring. And not 08h31 because the appointments will already be gone. And since they will not give you one of tomorrow’s appointments you can either tough it out today and then call tomorrow for tomorrow’s appointment lottery or you can head for a hospital – I think.) I have acquired a new respect for all aspects of private medicine.

Bottom line, no place is perfect, nor is any place totally imperfect. If I may steal from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (pay attention children because this was a song that you were conceivably conceived to): If you can’t be in the place you love, love the place you’re in. (And stop sniggering Dad.)