US guru drills Lands Ministry on service delivery
Baboki Kayawe | Tuesday May 12, 2015 15:45
The veteran expert’s entry comes in the wake of repeated skirmishes at land allocation initiatives countrywide, in which desperate landseekers have stampeded even to merely submit applications. In the latest such incident, police were forced to fire teargas and arrest landseekers at a rowdy land application process at Letlhakane sub-land board last month. Yesterday, Tschohl, a customer service speaker whose career spans nearly 40 years, began imparting the key ingredients to customer satisfaction and excellent service delivery to over 500 ministry frontline employees from across the country at a three-day seminar. Tschohl said for the ministry to be at the forefront of customer service, its employees ought to see themselves in the business of customer service, not as a government organ.
“You are not a government organisation, you are a customer service organisation,” he advised.
“You need to compare against the most successful people and organisations in the world.
“It is crucial to avoid modelling yourselves on people who are less successful, with negative and degenerative attitudes.” He said customer experience was at the heart of customer service, and measurable through the speed at which services were rendered to people. Further, he urged the ministry to do away with procedures that dampened the customer experience such as forms that took time to fill in, though they had little or no value at all.
“You probably have forms that you have been using for years that have no value. These are some of the practices that result in negative customer experience,” Tschohl said. Part of the goal of being a customer-focused organisation is to increase speed, to have less expensive processes and less people involved in the service delivery value chain in the process, reducing corruption, Tschohl said.
At the heart of extraordinary customer service, he said, was the appreciation and recognition of employees. While he said managers had to reinforce that spirit because most employees feel unwanted, they also needed to address the burden of people stuck in jobs they hated.
“The problem is when an organisation has a lot of dead people; the body shows up but the mind is not there,” he said. “As managers you need to help them find employment opportunities elsewhere. “You don’t want people who do not enhance the customer experience.” In an interview on the seminar’s sidelines, the ministry’s permanent secretary, Thato Raphaka said his ministry has been inundated with complaints on poor service delivery.
He said all their departments grapple with a lack of understanding customer needs and aspirations.
“We are managing a very important resource and without a clear customer service strategy our role is difficult if not impossible to deliver,” Raphaka said. The PS added that some of their laws were obsolete and officers who are customer-focused would be better placed to find ways to address issues within these processes. Raphaka said the frequency of stampedes and long queues for land were born from lack of customer focus and understanding.
“We have been doing some things without engaging the customer, with only implementation in mind,” he said.
“The stampedes we have had came into being because we didn’t fully understand the customer and in most instances had underestimated the turn-out for land applications.” In response to the huge demand for land and the shortcomings of the current system, the ministry plans to roll out online land applications before the end of the current quarter.
“The forms are already available online, just that we had a challenge after realising that a land overseer needed to put in their signature.
“We are currently redesigning the forms to do away with that feature and the system will be running by the end of this quarter,” Raphaka said.
Meanwhile, a technical officer at Kgatleng land board, Omphile Clifford, said the seminar was an eye opener, as many employees had never received such training.
“It is important because it teaches the participants about conquering the challenges of customer dissatisfaction, especially the failure to deliver on time,” Clifford said.