Far from being a dream or wishful desire, delivering customer satisfaction through service excellence is imperative for every economy, industry, institution and individual in today’s competitive global marketplace. Barbados is no exception.
Adam Smith, Scottish pioneer of political economics and author of the groundbreaking text on modern economics Wealth of Nations, fundamentally defined the competitive realities of customer satisfaction over 240 years ago.
According to Smith, human beings are essentially buyers continually striving to maximize benefit versus cost and, over time, migrate to sellers that come closest to delivering this outcome, leaving them most satisfied.
The consequence: sellers generate more satisfaction and make more profit while buyers are better off.
This win-win approach is evidenced in the performance of many national and international brands which continue to thrive even in negative economic cycles. Consider the success of Coca-Cola, Toyota and Apple, as well as our own enduring brands like WIBISCO and Barbados Light & Power Company Limited.
Given the clear macro- and microeconomic benefits of unswerving commitment to customer service, we cannot allow the goal of service excellence to elude Barbados. Instead we must seek out the motivation necessary to reach it.
How can you become a motivated “seller” of service excellence – as an employee, organizational manager or national leader? Within our society there is diverse motivation.
Some easily aspire to the vision of a more prosperous future, enthusiastically setting goals, resourcing themselves, then delivering as required to reach them.
Others respond more readily to unacceptable changes in the status quo, working assiduously, even sacrificing, to protect it.
Irrespective of our motivation, we all have worthy roles to play as “sellers” delivering service excellence.
Government must provide high-quality infrastructure, education and other social services to satisfy the socio-economic expectations of its citizens and encourage local and foreign investors to expand employment and economic opportunity.
Public and private sector institutions must meet their statutory or shareholder mandates to deliver positive customer outcomes while ensuring greater efficiency or profit as well as growth. Employees at all levels must deliver job performances that satisfy employers’ objectives in order to maintain and enhance their economic prospects.
The National Initiative for Service Excellence (NISE) sees its role as a catalyst for service improvement through education, consultancy, public awareness and measurement.
To date NISE has facilitated customer service training for over 4 000 managerial, supervisory and frontline employees drawn from the public sector as well as private sector companies in the retail, tourism, banking, insurance and real estate industries.
To empower Barbadian consumers to expect and demand service excellence, NISE continues to conceptualize unique public awareness and recognition programmes under its “Live Excellence” slogan.
Most recently, the organization launched Barbados’ first national customer satisfaction measurement and benchmarking tool, the NISE Customer Satisfaction Index.
It was specifically designed to assist Government and the private sector to continually monitor service quality, pinpoint areas for service-delivery improvement, and internationally benchmark institutional, sectoral and national service delivery performance over time.
In order to bring to fruition our shared need to achieve service excellence, we must all acknowledge and embrace our individual roles as sellers within the Barbadian economy.
We each must ask: are we on track to achieve our vision for the future or avoid the troubling trends in the status quo?
Are we shaping appropriate societal and organizational cultures, and developing the necessary attitudes and skill sets to deliver maximum customer satisfaction, retain more buyers and generate more profit?
Are we tapping into available resources to enhance our ability to deliver world-class service?
Let us act on the premise and promise of Adam Smith. Let us each play our role in ensuring that Barbados achieves the imperative of service excellence.
