Issues management is at the core of organisational sustainability

Recent customer service I experienced at the Nyl Mainline Plaza on an N1 Northbound trip was not a pleasant one.

The experience left me with having to agree with management consultant Peter Drucker when he said: “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.”

I am always understanding when having to spend some time at the toll gates in case of high traffic traffic volumes. That Sunday afternoon, however, left me with a lot of questions.

Arriving at the plaza about 4.50pm and with all gates signalling green, nobody explained the reason why I could only make my way through 26 minutes later, which is not so much the main issue here.

I can attest to the chaos or neglect that customers experience during work shift change over, which I initially suspected could be the case.

Though not addressing customer service but the communication subject matter, in his doctoral thesis titled “Communication for effective developmental Local Government in rural North-Eastern Limpopo Province of South Africa”, Dr Naledzani Rasila points out that, communities “turn to protest against government institutions out of frustration caused by lack of information.” In the case in question, all I needed was information, but the toll collector never bothered to provide information on the reason for the delay!

Though they often deliver bad news, read “loadshedding”, you cannot fault Eskom on communicating with customers, except of course when they are wrestling with National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) to charge us more for electricity!

Read: Nersa delivers a body blow to Eskom

Back to the Nyl Plaza matter, I was ready to let it slide but I asked myself if we have grown accustomed to bad customer service!

Dr Dolf Steyn’s words from the previous day in a project management class that “the problem is that we are not honest enough to call out people when they do wrong things” were also fresh in my mind. Another issue was that, while waiting in traffic that Sunday afternoon, a tweet in which I tagged South African Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) had not yielded a reaction more than 12 hours later.

I used the number on the toll slip to enquire about the incident the following day. What puzzled me was that the lady (name withheld) on the other side of the telephone could not tell me exactly what the challenge was, instead blamed everything from loadshedding causing the system to be offline to heavy traffic caused by soldiers travelling southbound from Armed Forces Day 2020 duty in Polokwane. She asked about the lane I passed through and the time I made the payment, promising to revert back upon investigation.

Read: Eskom’s troubles laid bare

I found her lacking in empathy and patience, as I could hear the irritation in her now raised voice.

Practical experience in dealing with customer service has shown that it takes effort to balance customer expectation and experience.

In my time in a marketing and customer service environment for a casino establishment 18 years ago, I was confronted with a situation where a customer accused me of helping others before him. I was able to calm the customer using inherent communication and patience skills, also through skills in dealing with difficult customers acquired from training.

Though the customer appeared intoxicated and was unreasonably difficult, the story had a happy ending as we have a cordial relationship up to this day.

During my receiver of revenue days, I learnt the importance of transferring a customer to the correct line or department the first time. On the flip side, I have also experienced some customers getting irritated when probed on their type of query in order to correctly refer them the first time.

Going back to the unanswered Twitter query, from a public relations and communication management context, my view is that the company missed an opportunity to use the platform as an issue management tool, thus listening to what customers are thinking or saying about the organisation. That issue management is at the core of organisational sustainability.

Author Ken Blanchard said: “If your employees are disengaged, and they don’t take care of your customers, it doesn’t matter how good your strategy is; your customers will still go somewhere else.” Unfortunately for some of us there is nowhere to go, because travelling on the R101 route comes with its challenges.

Seventy two hours later, there was no reaction to my follow-up tweet, which is by standards a long turnaround time. More than 48 hours later I was still awaiting a call back from Tolcon Group.

Upon my telephonic follow-up, a different lady (name withheld) took my call.

Wait for it ... as she had just started her shift, an indication was that there was a new occurrence book (OB) in place and my query might have been registered in a previous OB, which was now full.

One would have thought the whole OB talk would be a backup to a computerised and integrated customer relationship management system. So much for the Fourth Industrial Revolution!

After this unmet expectation, my reminder to organisations is that implementation of customer service and social media management should be aligned to overall business strategy and objectives.

Maubane is a public relations strategist and a social commentator.

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