Why it is vital to salvage our customer care

It is always said that the customer is King. This old age adage is sometimes not taken too seriously and in Rwanda it has become clear that despite the many achievements gained over the last 17 years, something is still amiss when it comes to customer care. Someone defined customer care as “doing the customer a favour by relieving them of their money and offering in return a negative experience with little or no opportunity for rescue when dissatisfaction occurs.”There are certain realities that we must confront as a country. We are a people who have worked and continue to work hard to put behind us our dark past and we have embraced or still grapple to embrace attributes that can propel us to higher levels of development. But we are also acutely aware that we must use our internally generated resources if we are to survive in the long term. Secondly, our long term success as a nation shall depend more on how we develop the business and service sectors than the public sector that is expected to shrink. Thirdly, the profitability of our private enterprises shall be directly related to the degree with which customers engage in their services and products. Finally, excellence in customer service is a winning strategy for achieving long-term profitability in the business sector, for maximizing the level of engagement between customers and organisations and for providing a competitive weapon for those industries engaging in import substitution and export. With the globalisation of markets, the advancement of technology, and the degree of international competition, fewer nations have the ability to temper, ignore or even escape the currents that draw them into the whirlwind of “economic warfare”. As no country can truly ignore or escape the currents, it becomes necessary to find effective measures to temper the effects.It is not difficult to show that excellence in customer service results in increased profitability because it reduces costs and it maximizes the retention of customers—the most valuable asset of any organization. If quality product and quality service is not provided, our import substitution will without doubt fail. Local consumers will opt for foreign brands that they consider to be superior. Similarly, export initiatives will also fail if our product and service quality are wanting. International customers will simply not purchase our products.Rwanda’s service sector is relatively small but it is hoped that it will contribute more and more to employment and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) compared to agriculture which contributes to nearly 80 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product. That there is lack of customer care or service is not in doubt. But the word customer service make people think of uber-globalised corporations that have draconian ideas about how their staff have to treat customers. In simple terms, customer service is the basic ideology of respecting your customers and treating their time like it is valuable. And this is what drives business all over the world. If you are in Japan and you happen to be late for a meeting you might as well just spend the next two weeks trying to make it to the company or organization you may be working for. There is good news that the Rwanda Development Board’s Tourism and Conservation Department is already promoting the hospitality industry in partnership with other stakeholders to promote better customer care and service delivery across a broad spectrum of the country’s hotels, lodges, and restaurants that are clearly on the increase. While these efforts are important, improvement in customer care shall greatly depend on how much our people are prepared to embrace change. It will require more than training, seminars and salary increases for staff in the hospitality industry. Improvement in customer care will not require a magic wand. It will need an attitude change, a paradigm shift—in fact a kind of re-engineering of the way customers are treated.