Just last week, (the exact date I cannot recall) the lights at my house flickered around 12 midnight for a while and then went out, plunging us into darkness. We quickly checked the street lights and the adjoining houses and the lights were on. We thought that something must be wrong with our internal wiring and checked the mains and the trip switch.
Then we resorted to the “tried and tested” on-off method with the mains switch and the trip switch, but nothing happened. Then we thought of waiting until dawn and calling an electrician. But then, on a whim, my wife suggested calling the hotline of Lanka Electricity Company Limited (LECO) which provides electricity to the Maharagama area where we live.
We called the hotline around 1 a.m., without any real hope of a LECO crew coming our way. The operator answered on the very first ring, responded very courteously and noted down the details. I also got a reference number by SMS on my phone immediately afterwards. But we had even locked the front gate by then, assuming that no work crew would come at this bewitching hour.
But to our surprise, barely 10 minutes after my call, a LECO truck was at our gate. We hurriedly unlocked the gate and let the work crew in. We again told them what the problem was but sheepishly admitted that the problem could have something to do with our internal wiring. “That’s all right, we will take a look” one workman told me.
They then inspected our trip switch, found nothing wrong with it and proceeded to inspect the electricity meter connection. That too turned out to be perfect and then one of the members of the crew climbed to the pole right opposite the house to check the connection there. He did not even take two minutes to figure out that the fault lay there – there was a loose connection probably as a result of “monkey business”. In just 10 minutes, they worked in unison to restore power to our residence.
We profusely thanked them and just a few minutes after they left, I got another SMS from LECO to rate the service of their crew. I responded with an “excellent” rating. Someone from LECO even called me the next morning to check whether there were any problems thereafter. I reassured him that there weren’t any.
This is an excellent example of stellar customer service from a fully-owned subsidiary of a State organisation (the Ceylon Electricity Board). But before we go any further, here is a definition of “customer service” – it is the support a company provides to customers before, during, and after they buy or use a product or service. It can be provided through a variety of channels, including phone, email, chat, and text.
Generally, the phone should be answered on the third ring. The customer should not be told to “hang on” for minutes on end, because people lead busy lives. In principle, I do not like automated phone answering systems, where it takes ages to get to a human operator, if at all. It is better only to give a language option and then straight away switch to an operator or customer service agent who speaks that particular language.
Ill-equipped
I was overseas for a few months last year and one day wanted to find out some details about a credit card. After calling the relevant bank, I had to listen to their ‘hold” music and promotional clips for almost 15 minutes, by which time my IDD roaming bill had reached stratospheric heights (these numbers cannot be reached via Whatsapp). Needless to say, I could not get the information I wanted. The next day, when I eventually got through, the agent asked me to call during office hours (SL time), but this only gave me a small window as I was in the US, with an almost 10 hour time difference. I gave up at this point.
Many companies are also deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots for customer service. But they are not equipped to handle complex queries and of course, do not possess the emotional intelligence needed to deal with a human. They will sometimes give a totally wrong answer to a query. Again, it is better to have a human operator handling the chats. Email and even normal SMS are rather slow and should be used only if there is no other alternative. Customer service should essentially be an immediate affair with a human touch.
In this context, the LECO team covered the four key principles of good customer service: Personalisation, competency, convenience, and being proactive. These factors have the biggest influence on the customer experience.
According to customer service gurus, good customer service always starts with a human touch. Personalised interactions greatly improve customer service and let customers know that a company cares about them and their problems. Instead of thinking of service as a cost, companies and organisations should consider it an opportunity to earn a customer’s business all over again.
Consumers have identified competency as the element that plays the biggest role in a good customer experience.
To be competent, a customer support professional must have a strong knowledge of the company and its products, as well as the power to fix the customer’s problems. The more knowledge they have, the more competent they become.
Customers want to be able to get in touch with a customer service representative through whichever channel is the most convenient for them. They should offer support through the channels of communication customers rely on most, and make it easy for customers to figure out how to contact the organisation in question.
Customers want companies to be proactive in reaching out to them. If there is a problem, companies should proactively reach out to customers and explain the problem. They may not be happy about the situation, but they will be thankful that they were kept in the loop. I know of a car importer here whose service agents called around 500 buyers of their cars to inform them of a service recall. Yes, they would simply have published an advertisement in a newspaper about the product recall, but in ditching that option and calling every affected customer individually, made their day. The customers felt that the company cared enough about them to call them personally.
In this respect, the LECO response I have outlined above is also an example to many other organisations, public and private, that do not take customer service very seriously. I have seen the proclamation “the Customer is King” at many places, but this is confined to mere words and the workers see the customer as a distraction, not an asset.
Customer, the most important visitor
This is actually a shortened form of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote: “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.”
Government offices are the worst when it comes to customer service, where Gandhi’s advice is often thrown out of the window. People who come to these offices to get their work or documents done are often sent from pillar to post from morning to afternoon. In the meantime, the “lunch hour” extends to well over 90 minutes, with a fair chunk of time also going to morning and afternoon tea.
It is no secret that some Government officials also demand a “consideration” for doing the work that they are anyway supposed to do. Eliminating such graft at the State service should be a priority for the “Clean Sri Lanka” program now under way. Even Presidents and Prime Ministers have made surprise visits to these offices but the circus goes on as usual from the very next day.
Public or private, any organisation should be guided by two main principles – efficiency and productivity. Over in the United States, President Donald Trump has created a new entity called the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) headed by the world’s richest man Elon Musk to oversee and trim the Federal Government. While DOGE’s actions seem to be somewhat drastic, misguided and perhaps even illegal, the premise behind it suggests that Government departments and agencies are inefficient even in the most advanced economies.
Here in Sri Lanka, we have a bloated Public Service that is best known for the lethargic attitudes of its employees. Hence the critical need for Public Service Reforms, with a special emphasis on loss-making State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Reforming and restructuring these entities in one way or another is essential, along with a change of attitudes of employees. It does not help that many of these employees are political appointees who swear allegiance to one political party or the other. This was, in fact, one of the reasons why the masses voted for the party currently in power – to effect a “System Change” in governance and the wider society.
Mismanagement by unqualified personnel
There are a few glaring examples for loss-making SOEs, the biggest among them being SriLankan Airlines which had nosedived into the red thanks to years of mismanagement by unqualified personnel after Emirates left. They did not know anything about aviation, which is a very complex business. Since the Government has ruled out privatisation of the airline per se, restructuring is the next best option. Around the world, many State-owned airlines are making record profits – Emirates and Singapore Airlines are two great examples. The lesson here is that “State-owned” is not an automatic recipe for losses. The secret lies in having the right people in the right places. This is what the private sector generally excels in.
Sometimes, drastic measures are called for to enhance customer service. One recent example is the Government’s decision to issue passports on a 24/7 basis to fill the backlog of applications at the Department of Emigration and Immigration. While this is not a case of inefficiency per se, there have been problems stemming from the economic crisis which had hindered the work of many Government and private sector organisations. The same issue had affected the Department of Motor Traffic (DMT/RMV). These issues should be addressed without delay.
I mentioned productivity as the second pillar of an organisation’s success. This is actually a tangible measurement of efficiency – the work output of a given person or organisation based on the inputs provided. In short, highly efficient organisations have higher productivity.
But productivity as a concept can apply to any sector – agriculture, for example. Serious questions have been raised about agricultural productivity in Sri Lanka as our crop yields are much lower than even those of other Asian countries. This aspect must be addressed if we are to avoid a food crisis later on.
There are also fears that the rise of AI and other technologies could completely remove the human factor from our everyday transactions. It is already possible to do almost all of one’s banking transactions without ever meeting a teller in person. In fact, there already are “virtual banks” which do not have any human staffers. But in the end, there is nothing like a warm smile, a courteous “good morning” and small talk from an actual human to get the ball rolling, so to speak.
