By SERAPHINE RULIGIRWA-KAMARA
I feel terribly sorry for this lot; they have these grand ideas that require obscene amounts of money to bring to life.
So they scrape and scrounge for every coin, borrow from
everyone they know and their grandmothers to put together an enterprise.
Business plans however great don’t really bring
much in the way of start-up capital but if they can mortgage that family
tucked away in their ancestral land, some hawkish financial institution
locks them up in an airtight 15-year Kamiti-like repayment prison.
You get the picture - it takes a helluva lot to
start a business. After all that, they turn around and shoot
themselves right in the leg. Oh, entrepreneurs!
The calibre of staff we hire as entrepreneurs make
or break our businesses. I was treated to this very sobering fact real
time last week.
A small domestic airline made a mistake on a
client’s booking and asked him to pay for a booking change when he had
already done it online.
The system should have had this information. It
didn’t. Well, you know technology - it tends to fail you when you need
it the most.
The client was shocked and refused to pay any more
money and asked the check-in staff to call the manager. The manager
for whatever reason didn’t come as quickly as would have been considered
good customer service response.
Let’s be reasonable here; a lot of managers do not
sit around doing nothing, therefore it is very possible that she was
held up by a different, equally, if not more pressing task.
The client complained bitterly about the
unresponsive manager and the booking mistake. I stood there watching
this unfortunate situation unfold in utter disbelief.
Watching both the passenger and the check-in staff,
it was easy to assume that the passenger had been unreasonable prior to
my arrival resulting in the lack of acknowledgement from the staff.
After a while, I couldn’t help but ask the client
what the problem was. A simple system glitch that did not reflect a
payment that the client had made while checking in online.
Instead of acknowledging the system error, the
attending staff simply moved on to check him in. The long awaited
manager eventually strolled to the counter where we were.
Not a care or concern in the world about an upset
passenger waiting for her. She didn’t introduce herself and it wasn’t
evident that she was a supervisor until she started asking the staff
questions that led us to deduce that she was in charge.
One really must take care to be presentable. If as
a business owner you’re going to have your staff uniformed, then high
quality, impeccable maintenance and upkeep of the same in not negotiable
That desirable impressive effect of smartly-dressed
airline crew cannot be achieved without this. Take corners and even
your top tier crew members end up looking like disgruntled hungry
waiters in a low-level roadside eatery - this hopefully is not the look
you have in mind.
The upset passenger had to ask if she was indeed the manager
- it wasn’t evident. Surely you know as an entrepreneur that customer
service staff are the face of your business and are going to spend the
time, effort and resources to ensure that your frontline team are the
right people.
You can get away with a few short-cuts in hidden
areas of your operation but staff without good attitude is not one of
them. Proper customer service must be at the core of the company’s
ethos.
The passenger eventually asked why there was a
problem and why no one as much as acknowledged, owned up or apologised
for it. The best that this so-called manager could manage is promise an
investigation and feedback thereafter. Wow.
The passenger got to his boiling point and called
that exactly what it was - a stupid answer. He didn’t have to put it
quite that way especially because it weakened his position as a
complainer but I had to agree. It wasn’t the smartest answer I’ve ever
heard.
“Hello, my names is Seraphine Ruligirwa-Kamara, I
am in charge of the XYZ operation here. I regret that I couldn’t be
here sooner, Mr ABC I understand that we have had a problem with your
booking payment and that it is a result of a system glitch on our end. I
am very sorry that you’ve been inconvenienced, Mr ABC I trust that my
colleague, PQR has manually corrected this. I understand how annoying
this can be and you are well within your rights to be upset. Here are
some of the steps I’ve taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
Kindly accept my sincere apology.”
This is all it would have taken to calm this client
down, walk him to the aircraft and keep him flying the airline time and
again.
This brand of sense may not be common but with a
great attitude and some training, it becomes the way in which your
clients are handled time and again as a standard.
What calibre of staff do you have interfacing with
your clients? If they are like the lot I recently watched in inaction,
you’re going to be beholden to your creditors for a while yet because
you are unlikely to break even, let alone register any profits in the
near future.
Ms Seraphine is an expert on Attitude & Human Potential, sera@iuponline.com | @SRuligirwa
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