The Death of Customer Service

Perhaps it's a uniquely South African thing, but customer service here really stinks.

Our IT guys have been waiting a week for a new firewall, promised to them as a sure thing. In the meantime our access fluctuates from slow to non-existant.

Our Finance office waited for days for a Pastel bloke to turn up and correct an error, after being told he was "on the way" and "will be there by 11" for days in a row. In the meantime they can't close off the month, nor balance anything.

Deliveries are late, queries go unanswered, queues at the Motor Vehicles Department office take an hour and a half to get through (14 people in the queue), and at the Deparment of Home Affairs it takes all day to hand in a passport application form. Most folk palm you off on someone else instead of going the extra mile, so you end up pushed from one place to another, one extension to another, one day to another...

Other bloggers have moaned too - a standing joke along the Chuck Norris lines is that Steve Hofmeyer (big SA music star in many quarters) ordered an ADSL line from Telkom (local telephone company) and got it THE SAME DAY! Ask any SAfrican who has dealt with Telkom about service, and you'd better have a few hours of free time to listen.

The list of gripes goes on and on. So why is no-one doing anything about it?

Imagine if one company had a pretty good product, but then decided they would be the best customer servers you could get in the country. Imagine if they went the extra mile, got all efficient, did things when they said they would, and responded with split-second timing to queries, making it as easy for their customers as possible to do business with them.

They'd make a fortune!

So why have very few companies, and their employees, caught on? Can we make them?