Ideas from an eclectic mind - Beyond 'Na Yombi' customer service

Tomorrow, the CHAN 2016 football fiesta will come to an end. Les Leopards of DR Congo will take on Mali in what should be scintillating finale to a well-organized and attended tournament. As Rwandans, we have every right to be proud of ourselves. Even CAF approves with acknowledgement that in the near future, we will be ready to host the big one; the African Cup of Nations. Rwanda’s deliberate strategy to position itself as a top destination for MICE tourism is beginning to bear fruit. As the back patting starts and the celebratory champagne gets chilled, let us engage in a bit of the customary “kwinegura” that follows successful albeit challenging missions. On Saturday January 16, the day of the official opening ceremony of CHAN 2016, I happened to be in one of the leading entertainment spots within Kigali. A group of friends and I planned to meet for lunch and also follow the live televised opening ceremony as it unfolded at Amahoro National Stadium. On arrival for our rendezvous in Kicukiro, we were surprised to find that no arrangements had been made to show the live broadcast of the opening ceremony of CHAN 2016! The TV screens in the sports bar were showing an assortment of Zambian football, Nigerian music and South African Cricket! Rwanda was hosting Africa’s second most important football competition and the management of one of Kigali’s leading sports bars was indifferent to the significance of the opportunity that lay before them! Eventually after a lot of patience and incessant cajoling we got to watch part of the live broadcast and our own Amavubi turned an otherwise miserable afternoon into a joyous one with their 1-0 win over Les Elephants of Cote d’Ivoire. Yet, after the celebrations died down, I could not get the afternoon’s debacle out of my head. Why on earth would you be in the business of entertainment and not ensure that your clients are having a great time? At some point we had threatened to leave if the TV channel could not be changed to Rwanda Television but we were met by a wall of silence and inaction. Questions kept popping up that remained unanswered; how was Rwanda going to entertain her guests if even the locals were left unsatisfied? Why do new bars/restaurants keep opening while older ones are shutting down? Why aren’t Rwandan customers loyal in the long term? Then I landed on a 2009 study commissioned by IPAR and done by Gloria Lwakabamba and Paul Skidmore. The research project’s preliminary findings are titled “Examining Rwanda’s ‘Culture of Mediocrity’” (PDF). The findings hit me like a tonne of bricks! I knew there was a problem but I didn’t know how bad it was. My analysis of the findings led me to an obvious conclusion; Rwandan businesses had not figured out the co-relation between customer retention and long term profitability as demonstrated by the satisfaction – profit chain! By retaining customers, a business earns more from those individuals over their lifetime and they also help to market its services to peers which leads to constant expansion of the business’ customer base at no extra cost! According to the IPAR study, Rwanda stands to gain an increment of US$40 million to annual GDP by improving customer service alone. While the “Na Yombi” campaign focuses on meeting customer expectations by creating awareness among service providers, in my opinion this does not go far enough. For Rwanda to achieve its long term MICE tourism ambitions, businesses need to exceed expectations and provide a unique value proposition that we can identify as “Rwandan Hospitality”. To illustrate, I will share an experience of my expectations being exceeded. In mid 2008, I happened to be in Hong Kong on a work trip. It just so happened that my birthday fell on a day midway this three-week long trip. The Far East is renowned for their hospitality and not without reason. On the evening of my birthday, July 18, my colleagues and I happened to be having dinner in “The Old Captain”, an up market restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui when one of our hosts proposed a toast. The waiters quickly noticed that we were celebrating something. One waiter stepped over and whispered to the Chinese host doing the toast. After a short conversation, we were showed to a private banqueting room and offered a bottle of wine of our choice and a cake materialized in no time! We were in a group of about six people; for the next two hours we were treated like royalty! The memory is so fresh more than seven years later. Perhaps RDB and PSF can go further than “Na Yombi” by engaging businesses at the sub-sector level as they have done with the hoteliers by introducing a star rating system that differentiates service standards amongst different market players. In Europe, they have the coveted Michelin stars for restaurants which are assessed annually to ensure that standards are maintained. RDB and PSF can come up with their own standard that is heavily biased towards customer service. The detailed annual assessments can be preceded by snapshot monthly assessments with a list of the best and worst in each subsector being published in the leading national media. This name and shame campaign may be what is needed to jolt our service sector into action. According to Stephen J. Dubner and Steve Levitt, the co-authors of “Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”, human beings only respond to incentives. These may be either positive or negative. The persistent poor customer service may be due to a lack of incentives for change. By shining the spotlight on individual businesses rather than blanket approaches to entire sub-sectors, businesses may be motivated to act either to appear as the leading stars in their respective subsectors or not to appear in the national media for all the wrong reasons. Either way, the clients would get a better service and gradually Rwanda’s customer service image will improve. The writer is a consultant and trainer specializing in Finance and Strategy. He is based in Kigali

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Ideas from an eclectic mind - Beyond 'Na Yombi' customer service