Customer experience should not be an annual affair – GNCCI

The Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GNCCI) has called on businesses to make customer service an everyday activity for their clients and customers instead of an annual commemoration.

During the annual customer week celebration, most companies put in various activities including dressing in the professions of their customers, providing incentives to clients, and putting up a friendlier working environment to appreciate the customer.

Mr Michael K. Caesar, Chairman, GNCCI-Tema Branch, however, stated that having such annual fanfare without proper customer service from the establishments afterward was not the best.

Mr Caesar said this during a day’s customer experience workshop organised by the GNCCI-Tema Branch on the theme: “Customer Experience Aiding the growth of Businesses.”

He noted that the customer week celebration could be used to create awareness while engaging and getting feedback on the company’s activities from the customer for a year under review.

“The customer must live the experience everyday, the awareness could be created, and if you want to observe that day, it must be a day of engaging, and getting feedback on what you have been doing over the days, and to help you to notch up what you think you’ve been doing everyday, and what you provide your customers,” he added.

He added that businesses must lift their game and ensure that they do not only create awareness of customer service around a week’s celebration but also look at the flaws in their system and improve it by training and retraining their staff to deliver the kind of customer experience needed to get a repeat purchase from customers.

“It is important to monitor and create a customer experience that helps the business provider to know how the customer feels and get to know if they are delighted and satisfied with the way you deal with them,” he said.

Mr Caesar said customer experience was very important as customers had become very sophisticated adding that business owners must not be ignorant about the need to survey their customers and client needs.

Touching on the workshop, he said it was the second session for this year as the first one was held in April on customer service, while the second session was on customer experience to give the staff of member firms back to-back-knowledge of these things to help them improve their businesses.

Mrs Yvonne Ohui MacCarthy, Customer Service Consultant, President of the Institute of Customer Service Professionals, speaking as a resource person said it was important for businesses to change the mindset about their customers as according to her how they describe the customers as the ones they will meet at their establishments.

Mrs MacCarthy advised businesses not to just create change but create a consistent culture, noting that they must start looking at customer service as a culture that must be part of the way they think and sees things.

She said to achieve a customer service culture, an effort must be made to get the staff to understand the culture being created as they were internal customers, adding that customers must also be listened to by business operators.

She also asked them to hire right, have a clear customer care service goal or objective, include everybody in the fulfilment of the goal, draw up realistic strategies to help achieve the goal, and commit resources to it. -GNA