We need a Customer Care watchdog

When I read the news piece in TNT (The New Times) concerning the creation of a Customer Care Committee I was like ‘good move!’ but when I thought about it deeply, I realised I had some misgivings. At this juncture what we need is not a committee that will go around sensitising people about customer care. I doubt that this approach will yield the desired results at the required time considering the problem that we have at hand. Ours is a situation that has dropped to the lowest possible level and bringing it around would require serious resuscitation, before being taken to the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) for stabilisation. After a long time in ICU and relocation to the ward for recovery, it is then that care would come in handy. This is the stage the committee will undertake and this is the reason why I think that they will be employing the wrong approach as a start. I say it (customer care) has dropped to the lowest possible level because even purported role models from the private sector have found themselves succumbing to the customer care rot. For instance MTN started off as the ultimate pioneer of high quality customer care, ushering in unprecedented services that left Rwandans seeing it as a reflection of the good things to come along with the development of corporate business in Rwanda. MTN Rwandacell I remember when the company had just started operations in Rwanda around 1998, they would go a long way to apologise and explain any kind of hitch that occurred on their network. Just watch them now. Their network has been experiencing serious ups and downs since early last year but if there were any explanations and apologies, they were minimal and did not measure up to the communication problems suffered by their clients. Recently when they were ‘migrating’ to the ‘078…’ platform I happened to go to the central offices at the ‘MTN house’ to seek for services but I was quite disappointed to see that the ladies working at the front desk (apart from one long serving staff) were no longer the cute smiling and hospitable lot that made MTN the talk of town. On the contrary, these ones were even squabbling over who should handle clients, because some claimed they had worked since morning and needed to go home to rest, never mind that it was barely five O’clock. And all this was happening before the full glare of the frustrated clients. Electrogaz Where I stay in Remera, we recently had electricity problems running for a whole month. The problem affected around seven houses resulting from damage to an underground electricity cable. We reported this several times to electrogaz but they told us that they could not easily establish the exact place where the cable was damaged and therefore we had to hire people to dig out the cable and once we found the damaged area, we would call them to come and fix it. This we did by contributing money and hiring people to dig out the whole length of the cable. This was damn expensive. When they finally sent the technician to fix the cable, he told us that we had to buy cable casings (boite) to link the damaged area and another cable (did we really have to?). This we did because we were tired of living without electricity. But as the technician was fixing the first damage, he made more damages to the cable in several places. When it rained two weeks later, smoke was seen coming from under the soil. We were back to square one. Then my neighbour’s cash power had a problem of switching on and off the next day. When he reported this problem, the electrogaz technicians came after three days and took away the faulty gadget, promising to replace it. He had to go to the area station in Kabeza several times only to be given another faulty one that had the same problem. He once again reported the problem and the cycle started all over again, and was informed at every follow up visit that he had to wait until a consignment of the gadgets arrived, without being given a timeframe. Frustrated, he had to go home and wait- in darkness. Landlords and landladies Then, last but certainly not least, there are these arrogant and unapologetic landlords and of course landladies. Although their main business is to rent out their houses to those that have not yet had the luck to build their own houses (or will never have the luck to do so for that matter), they take them to be lazy society outcasts who have failed to construct their own houses and are out to inflict structural damage their hard earned property. In other words, they think they are actually doing their tenants a favor to accommodate them. The fact that they are aware that Kigali has an acute housing problem has compounded the problems of the tenants as they continue to bear psychological torture at the hands of these house owners, never mind that some of these houses are not in what you would call habitable conditions. They know that getting a house to live in these days requires lots of saving and spending because you have to first of all pay house agents (les commissionaires) without a guarantee that you will get one, and once you do, most house owners will not accept less than five months’ rent in advance. The landlords and ladies will capitalise on this and literary torture you with frequent unfair rent hikes, rent payment ultimatums and so forth because they know that you have to bear their unfair treatment rather than be thrown out in the cold. What we need therefore, is not a sensitisation and awareness committee but a customer care watchdog that will vehemently fight for the rights of the helpless customers with powers to prosecute defaulters. Some of these acts border on criminal and therefore befitting prosecution. The President himself asked Rwandans to be tough and not to accept poor services but considering the situation and the lack of grounds on which to base to shun it, we are very helpless. Tel: 254-726268856Email: kanyamanza@gmail.com