The Beauty of Drowning

Drowning is a good thing. Yes drowning – going up and down in water and being unable to breathe!

It is Christmas holidays 2013 and we are in Tiwi Beach South Coast. My children are in the swimming pool cavorting around having a grand time and I am at the pool side. Sipping natural orange juice and reading David Baldacci’s Ground Zero. Just as the most handsome and manly Senior Agent Puller is just about to sneak up on the murderers and blow their heads off, I look up and see my 5 year old son Thayu drowning. Sinking into the water struggling to breathe. I throw away my book, rush to the pool, jump in and pull the boy out. We quickly pump his chest and soon he splutters back to consciousness and asks “Mum what happened to me?” And I respond “You were drowning.” “Oh? I was drownding?” “Yes son, you were drowning.” 

He pauses to consider this for a moment and then gets up, tells everyone around who cares to listen in his loudest voice “I was drownding! I was drownding! I was drownding!”And before my very eyes, my son who was drowning, takes one flying leap and jumps right back into the swimming pool to swim again. My heart stopped, and rest assured for the rest of the day my eyes didn’t leave the swimming pool. Even the attractive, handsome and daring Senior Agent Puller was relegated to second place.

This incident brings to mind the lessons we can learn from children. Here’s a 5 year old, drowning and getting right back up and leaping right back into the ‘danger’ zone. I imagine if this was you or me, we’d have been completely freaked out, fear would have taken over, and highly likely we’d never have gone anywhere near a swimming pool again or  better yet a bucket of water in our entire lives again. And to justify our being rooted in fear, we’d have developed a blockbuster of a story about the drowning experience which we’d be telling everyone who cares to listen in a bid to elicit their sympathy.

The great Malcolm X said and I quote “There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time”

There are three things to remind ourselves after an adversity or failure to get us back on track and moving if we are to live up to the wise words of the great Malcom X.

1.       It’s okay.  You will be okay. – Take all the time you need to heal emotionally.  Moving on and recovering from failure doesn’t take a day; it takes lots of little steps to be able to break free.  Just because today is painful doesn’t mean tomorrow won’t be great. 

2.       There is no success without failure. – A person who makes no mistakes is unlikely to make anything at all.  It’s better to have a life full of small failures that you learned from, rather than a lifetime filled with the regrets of never trying.

3. Life’s best lessons are learned at unexpected times. – Many of the greatest lessons we learn in life we don’t seek on purpose.  In fact, life’s best lessons are usually learned at the worst times and from the worst mistakes.  So yes, you will fail sometimes, and that’s okay.  The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with being brilliant.

This being a new year, with new beginnings and a new promise, it is the perfect time to look at our ‘drowning’ stories. That business that we started that failed and we lost money; that relationship that we got into that didn’t work out right; that job that we thought was just right and didn’t turn out to be; that investment we made that went sour ; that one time we got up to speak in front of an audience and the army of ahs’ eh’s and erm’s marched straight out of our mouths  – the list is endless…........

Let’s revisit these ‘drowning episodes’ and see how we may convert these into opportunities to try again and leap right back into it ‘Thayu Style’, for drowning is indeed a very good thing. Yes. It is!

Is Having a 'Customer Service Desk' A PR Gimmick?

                                                 This  article first appeared in Commerce and Industry Vol 2: 009 of Dec 2013

The government of Kenya is in the process of enhancing the way in which Kenyan citizens access public government services by putting up integrated one stop shops, in every county where citizen services will be provided from one central location. These citizen centers will be known as Huduma Centers. The key objective is to provide efficient, courteous and comprehensive services in an atmosphere of integrity and value. Having been involved in facilitating customer service training for the Huduma Center Staff, an interesting discussion kept arising about manning of the ‘customer care desk’ and who amongst the participants would be ideal to handle this role.

This begs a critical question about what exactly is a ‘customer care desk’. Many institutions across both the public and private sector have customer care desks. The common assumption is that this is a desk where customer care will be provided, customer information disseminated and possibly customer complaints handled. The organizations instituting these desks also run on the assumption that by having the desk they will be viewed as customer friendly and endear themselves to their customers and visitors alike.

In the service delivery circles, it is often a re-education process to rewire organizations’ thinking that customer service is not a department or not the domain of some select staff, but an organization-wide responsibility. Customer service is often not perceived as strategic and therefore not placed by top management as a key element in the organization’s corporate strategy. The element therefore of a customer service desk, then relegates the process further down the food chain, in the maturity level of organization customer centric rating.

And even if we are to cut the organizations with customer care desks some slack and acknowledge that indeed they have made some efforts towards focusing on the customer albeit in an untactical format, what has been the experience in general with regards to receiving service from these desks? To begin with, very often these customer service desks are actually operational business areas to conduct other functions. Let’s take the supermarket customer care desks for example. These are desks that are used to process non cash payments, hand out straws for yoghurt and other drinks and in some instances also double up as left luggage receptacles. How then would one access ‘customer service’ services from these already very busy personnel who more often than not are processing customer transactions and hardly have time to listen to customer issues?

Other organizations are currently swinging into the ongoing wave of outsourcing and have outsourced their customer service desk to security personnel.  If at all the customer service desk is to provide knowledgably exceptional service, it behooves the organization to place on of its own loyal brand ambassadors who lives and breathes the organization’s mission, vision and values and is a demonstrable example of the same. How would outsourced personnel, specialized in providing security service possibly be a replacement for this role?

That notwithstanding, the fact that customer service in this country is still in its infancy with regards to provision of courteous, respectful and competent  service consistently, renders many of these customer service desks a contradiction of their very purpose. Given the level at which customer service is often placed in corporate strategy, the frontline personnel assigned to man customer service desks are hardly ever the organization’s best and most valued resources. This naturally translates into service delivery that is commensurate with the level of persons deployed to the service. Is it then any surprise that the feedback received by customers visiting customer care desks is rarely positive? Granted indeed there are exceptions to the norm, these indeed are just that – exceptions. This is often evidenced by customer excitement over what should be the service norm, with customers quickly taking to social media to post their ‘exceptional’ experience on FaceBook or providing the service a #TwitterThumbsUp.

I am compelled at this point to emphasize that ‘customer care desks’ should be abolished.  Yes – completely disbanded and done away with never to be reinstated. The desk should be labeled with the specific role for which it has been put up, be it an information, reception, or enquiries desk and the specific service applied. Organizations should stop segmenting customer service and start to handle it as a corporate wide responsibility that needs to be ingrained from top to bottom.

Customer service is a culture. It is a way of life that is lived and breathed as part of an organization’s brand should it wish to be customer centric. This tenet needs to be taken up by organizations across all levels of the economic divide to turn around economic performance. We need to start a movement to have this adopted for a win-win outcome for both customers and businesses alike. Africa has a long way to go to completely turn this around and achieve the gains.

The Global Customer Experience Management Survey conducted in 2011 by Beyond Philosophy (http://www.beyondphilosophy.com/2011-global-ce-management-survey.pdf) indicates that for most companies in Africa, the focus is on acquiring customers and building relationships. It goes on to say that the pressure to retain customers is not a factor that influences strategy in most organizations and yet is still relevant and critical to business growth and long term success. 

But this is not to say that we should despair and throw in the quality service achievement towel. Not in the least. An uprising has started, with customers starting to demand better service, organizations starting to put customers at the center of their operations and the government bringing service closer to the people and defining courteous service as a deliverable.

Indeed the maxim driving the Huduma Kenya initiative captured as a slogan in their logo is Service Excellence. What better way to lead change and to transform Africa into a service delivery conscious continent, one service at a time? There is hope – rise up and be part of the change.