The Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GNCCI) Tema Branch, has organized a one-day customer service workshop for 45 employers and employees to equip them to give better services to their clients and customers.
The participants were taken through topics including service culture, setting standards, customer service leadership, communication in customer service, customer retention, and building a customer service team.
Mr Isaac Barry, Chairman of GNCCI, Tema, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview at Tema that the Chamber seeks to equip participants with the requisite knowledge and skills to create a high customer-oriented culture to attract and retain customers to increase sales and close quicker deals profitably.
Mr Barry said in today’s unpredictable economic environment, customers were seeking excellence in return for their money from service providers; service providers on the other hand were requiring staff whose valued transactions could delight customers to establish a loyal relationship.
He added that to achieve these goals, a high level of professional development in customer service was required in a well-structured manner to meet the need of today’s business executives.
Mrs Yvonne Ohui MacCarthy, President of the Institute of Customer Service Professionals, resource person for the workshop said there was the need for workers to change their mindset about their customers, explaining that customers were not difficult but rather situational as they react to what a company throws at them.
Mrs MacCarthy said developing a good customer service culture also required skills, commitment, involvement, and uncompromising, as good customer service does not happen by chance.
She noted that creating the needed change was not only about changing of physical structures of an organization, but rather by creating a culture from scratch by listening to the customer through the conducting of surveys, existing questionnaires, focuses group meetings, and asking for feedback.
She said listening to the customers creates the room for the organization to build a relationship with their clients and initiate the right goods and services they wanted.
“We have organizations that always want to think for the customers, they end up bringing out goods and services the customers don’t want and they wonder why,” she indicated.
Mrs MacCarthy noted that there was also the need for employers to hire right, stressing that people should not be hired just because of higher education, or friendship and relationships, but must rather put the right people in the right position for the good of the organization.
She said just as the customer is the most important person and needed to be satisfied, management of organizations must equally see their staff as internal customers who are the engine room of the company that also needed to be taken care of.
She stated that, when staff was empowered and made to feel part of decision-making, they work better and own the customer service culture of the organization.
She indicated that it was not enough for employers and management to pay rhetoric or write down their expectations for a transformation in their organizations without committing resources to it adding that some complained of not having monies to even get people to coach and train their staff while they expected the employer to give the needed results.
