Botswana firm earns prestigious award in Europe

Staff Writer | Thursday October 7, 2010 00:00

 

Crystal Academy of Management is a Gaborone-based capacity building and consultancy company specialising in public relations and customer care.

Nicknamed 'Stevie' for the Greek word for 'crowned,' the awards were presented to honourees in the evening of Monday September 27 at a gala dinner held at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Istanbul.

The Stevie Awards were created to honour and generate public recognition of the achievements and contributions of organisations and working people worldwide.

Crystal Academy of Management, which help care and cater for clients' work relations both internally and externally, was represented by its Managing Director, Goodwill Mothomogolo Motlhabane. He was presented with the award in the presence of an audience of business participants from over 40 countries.

For his part, Motlhabane said for his company to qualify, they displayed the quality service that his company offers and how it instantly reached maturity at an infant stage when they took part in a competition where they shared their success story.

Honourees were determined through two grounds of judging by professionals worldwide.

On the basis of how the company performed within its two to three years of operation, they were supported by web addresses of any news stories, press releases or other online documents that support the nominations.

Honourees were selected from more than 1, 700 entries received from organisations and individuals in more than 40 countries. PT CIMB Sun Life of Jakarta, Indonesia came first in the category of Best New Company of the Year while Crystal Academy shared the same price with Ubrain Communications of Seoul, South Korea.

Though Crystal Academy was the only company from Botswana, there were two other African countries participating, namely, a film production company and Mercedes Benz from South Africa and a corporate communications company from Kenya.

Said Motlhabane: 'Crystal Academy will not only benefit from the award by its brand and publicity being boosted; most importantly, the Awards Public Relations Agency will also work to generate international, regional and local exposure for distinguished honourees.'

Motlhabane added that because of Botswana's relatively poor customer service culture whose customer satisfaction index is far below the internationally accepted benchmark of 75 percent of satisfied customers, companies like Crystal Academy would have to play a yardstick role towards improving customer service and work with the Botswana National Productivity Centre to that end.