A country-wide study was carried out in December 2007

The Private Sector Federation (PSF) will soon release a study on the status of customer care in the country.

Flavia Mitali, Director Chamber of Tourism at the Private Sector Federation (PSF) said, "It (the study) will soon be released officially. But it has to be first copied to different departments and then it will be revealed to the public.”

Having been part of the group that carried out the survey Mitali added that, "We did the survey and found out that customer care is a problem. The problem is everywhere. Go to hospitals. It should be a national issue and a concern.”

Mitali also said that the level of customer care service creates differences between same services provided by various businesses. She wasn’t exact on the date of the official release of the study.

She cited that some of the lead causes of poor customer care were employees who tend to be reserved and lack product knowledge with a challenge of language barrier. 

The study was commenced in December 2007 and numerous sections across the country were surveyed.

Singling out the tourism sector, she said that the industry was getting huge numbers of tourists but it wasn’t exceptional to the poor customer care in the country.

Mitali attributed the success of the tourism sector to the rigorous external publicity done by government, the developement of the infrastructure and capacity building.

She also pointed out that there is only one privately owned tourism school, Rwanda Tourism Instutite in Kicukiro. She urged government to encourage customer care in the country by initiating the opening of schools.

Mitali said that the initial approach was to first use the media to sensitise the public on the problem.

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