The other day a friend went to get some studio photos taken.
She wanted the hard copies for framing and the soft copies sent to her email
address. The proprietors assured her that her photos would be sent by end of
business and she should check for her framed copies in a few days.
Three days later – the day she was supposed to check on the
framed pictures, nothing in her email.
Oh! Can we get back to you, the lady said in response to her
call inquiring about progress. They never got back.
She called again, Uhm! Our computer crashed we are now
working on them, should have them by end of day. That was two days ago.
When government, multilateral donor agencies, analysts
report that Uganda’s growth remains strong, our knee jerk reaction is to
dismiss them with a jeer.
Where is the growth, we ask. Nga we don’t see it!
But how much economic activity are we letting sprint out the doors of our businesses with our indifferent, negligent and more often than should be, hostile treatment of our clients – potential or current?...
Anyone who has been in sales knows it is much cheaper to
hold on to present clients than to try and woo new ones your way – in effort,
time and even money. And yet we continue to treat people seeking to patronise
our establishments as if we are doing them a favour.
We are caught in a time warp we need to free ourselves from.
Thirty, twenty even ten years ago traders and businessmen
were getting away with outlandish markups on their goods and services. They
could do this because there was a general scarcity of everything from blue band
to hair pieces to seat belts and virtually no competition.
Not only could they get away with extortionist pricing,
traders didn’t have to be nice to their customers and they didn’t. Customer
service was the exception rather than the rule.
Which reminds me.
Many years ago some friends and I went for lunch at Alligators,
which used to be situated at the corner of Kampala and Kyagwe roads. The lady
who took our order was young and easy on the eye.
But that was not the point,
she had no pen or notebook. After taking three or four totally disparate orders,
one of our number stopped to ask whether she wouldn’t forget our orders. She said
no she would remember.
He warned her that if she bungled the orders, she would not
hear the last of it. She politely agreed and continued taking the orders. We
might have been seven or eight of us.
After a few minutes wait she returned, a trolley in tow, on
it our orders.
She proceeded to distribute the orders with precision, never
once faltering or stopping to ask, who’s was the mushroom pepper steak with ice
cream?
You could have heard a pin drop when she set the last order
down.
Needless to say she was not there the next time we went. She
must have been snapped up by a businessman who knew a customer service asset,
when he saw one.
Client psychology is not difficult to decipher.
We return again and again to a shop, restaurant or car wash,
even if they are charging above market because we were treated well and with
consideration. And even when we cut our budgets to fit our cloth in economic
hard times, we will gravitate towards the place where customer service was best
no matter the cost.
While this is a text book cliché, it is amazing how it is
not wired into our business practices.
So when customers come only once to your business and never come back or turn at the door because they can immediately feel the bad vibes and we miss business, we then start wondering about this mythical economic growth....
It has been a hard five or so years, everybody has been
suffering a cash squeeze, as activity In the oil & gas sector petered out,
government embarked on its ambitious infrastructure drive and plugged many holes
through which they were leaking money (read, corruption).
But look around you, there are companies that have not only
survived during this down turn but have continued to thrive.
While it might be that they saved for the lean times during
the proverbial seven years of feasting, more often than not you will find that
they treat those who walk through their doors like people not ledger entries or
mere statistics, and we the customers repay them with continued patronage of
their businesses.
The saddest thing about giving good customer service is that
it’s rare that people will sing your praises from the rooftops, but what is
also true is that if you treat a customer badly they will tell everybody who
gives them half an ear, about your lousy touch.
So whenever someone tells me their business is struggling,
that the economy is in the toilet, I can’t help it, I wonder how their customer
service measures up.
