Lessons to learn from China’s service delivery

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Guangzhou International Airport. The local time is 2.45 pm and the outside temperature is 22°”. This was the sentence I have been waiting for all while on the plane. Service onboard was excellent. The journey had been long and I had tried all this while trying to forget my horrible transit experience in Nairobi. Yes Kenya Airways is doing its best in being “The Pride of Africa” but there are still lots that need to be improved upon; especially when one is in transit. Well, my first contact with the Chinese immigration at the Guangzhou g airport was quick and without any problem…..oh no, this isn’t really true because the scanning machine just bugged when our turn arrived. But within two minutes; the officer solved it. And this was his comment while giving us back our passports. “Sorry for having kept you waiting for so long. Please accept our apologies. Enjoy your visit in China”. Wow….a policeman apologizing for a delay of 2 minutes … I had never seen that elsewhere before. Immigration people are not always the friendliest people at airports. But I guess these Chinese have undergone much training and know how to create first positive impressions to visitors. Another lesson to learn in China was the speed of service. Your columnist was more than impressed. Right from the airport, I understood that ‘time is money’ means a lot for the Chinese. Everyone is almost running. People are so fast that coming from Rwanda where we are used to the contrary; adjusting to the speed of service even as customers became a challenge. Even when they are eating, they do this with such speed that one wonders how they manage not to get chocked. For instance, the Shanghai’s spanking-new Maglev (magnetic levitation) train is the world’s fastest and most futuristic passenger line in the world. And believe you me, this 245mph train was constructed only in four years. China is today known for its phenomenal growth not only because of the many reforms that have been put in place by government and the private business community but also because of the fact that Chinese are great workers. They are very focused on their work. They work for hours and have just few days of vacation. Talking about being focused, there is even a ban on the famous social network “Facebook” for instance. While in China, I could not access my blogs. Many might think these are signs of lack of freedom but your columnist considers this as a way of making people remain focused on their work. For developing countries like ours, we need to spend our precious time on more productive things. Do not take me wrong dear reader. I am not against Facebook as I am also a user of many social and professional networks such as Viadeo, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Facebook but I think we simply spend too much of time on them. Just look at most offices in town. People are connected on these social websites and spend less time on the real job for which they are paid. Some time back, an employee asked me to wait while he was busy chatting on yahoo messenger with friends. Workers across the country are collectively wasting huge amounts of company time these social networking sites. Research suggests that every day in every Australian company for instance, an average of one hour is being lost to the “underground intranet. According to an employment law firm in Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees “wasting time” on social networking. And this is probably the same in Rwanda and in Africa in general. A lesson we could learn from China is to become more productive with our time. Now is the right time to build our carriers and our nation if we want to become one day a great nation like China. sidossou@theservicemag.com