Rapheal John-Lall

Kevin Ram­soob­hag, on­line learn­ing sup­port su­per­vi­sor, Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), has tak­en to so­cial me­dia to car­ry out a fight against what he sees as the peren­ni­al prob­lem of poor cus­tomer ser­vice in T&T.

He launched the Web site, doit­tri­ni.com in Feb­ru­ary 2012 to give cus­tomers and busi­ness­es the chance to ex­press griev­ances about the lev­el of cus­tomer ser­vice in the coun­try.

He spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian last Thurs­day at the Guardian's of­fice on St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain.

"You can use face­book and twit­ter to in­ter­act with the site. So you are get­ting bad cus­tomer ser­vice and you can ac­tu­al­ly tweet it and users of the site see it. Cus­tomer ser­vice is a sore point. You go every­where and you see bad cus­tomer ser­vice."

Ram­soob­hag got the idea to start it be­cause he was tired of see­ing cus­tomers get­ting treat­ed bad­ly, but had no way to vent it.

On the Web site, when a busi­ness sets up a pro­file, there is a five-star rat­ing where peo­ple can rate how their ex­pe­ri­ence if they have that par­tic­u­lar ser­vice.

It is done for free as busi­ness­es do not have to pay, to be pro­filed on the Web site.

"Of course, these are anony­mous rat­ings with­out any­one fee­ing vic­timised. This is re­al feed­back. As a ser­vice provider, when you are rat­ed, it is logged, you see how peo­ple rate."

SMEs:

He said any­one who has a ser­vice to of­fer can go to doit­tri­ni.com and pub­lish their ser­vice.

Cur­rent­ly, there are 130 pub­lished busi­ness­es.

Many small and medi­um busi­ness­es which do not have their own Web site are com­ing to doit­tri­ni.com to es­tab­lish an on­line pres­ence, in­clud­ing cloth­ing, con­struc­tion, fi­nance.

"They are a mix of lo­cals and some for­eign busi­ness­es. These for­eign­ers are peo­ple who see the ben­e­fit of get­ting their busi­ness­es ad­ver­tised for free in T&T. With­in six months, there was some­one ad­ver­tis­ing fi­nan­cial ser­vices on the Web site and in six months, part­nered with a com­pa­ny in Aus­tralia."

He said there is a lot of ex­ter­nal on­line traf­fic with for­eign­ers look­ing to do busi­ness with T&T.

"I get a lit­tle un­der 400 hits a day. A quar­ter of those are new vis­i­tors."

Big­ger es­tab­lish­ments are now be­gin­ning to use the Web site as the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness ad­ver­tised its Dis­tin­guish­ing Lead­er­ship and In­no­va­tion Con­fer­ence on doit­tri­ni.com.

Ram­soob­hag said his re­search has shown that on­ly one per cent of cus­tomers who get bad ser­vice ac­tu­al­ly com­plain to the own­er of the busi­ness, the rest just nev­er re­turn to the es­tab­lish­ment.

"This Web site is for the 99 per cent of cus­tomers who nev­er com­plain and by putting it on­line, there is a true pic­ture of what re­al­ly goes on the floor of the busi­ness," he said.

Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd:

Three com­pa­nies spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian about how im­por­tant cus­tomer ser­vice is to their busi­ness­es.

In a state­ment on Tues­day, Re­pub­lic Bank called cus­tomer ser­vice the "life blood" of its busi­ness.

"At Re­pub­lic Bank, we have placed a fo­cus on de­liv­er­ing qual­i­ty cus­tomer ser­vice as a means of en­hanc­ing the Re­pub­lic Bank brand and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing our­selves from the com­pe­ti­tion."

"Sig­nif­i­cant ef­fort is put in­to en­sur­ing that all staff meet the re­quired ser­vice com­pe­ten­cies to de­liv­er a sat­is­fy­ing and re­ward­ing cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. This is done via 'across the board' work­shops, newslet­ters, li­brary fa­cil­i­ties with tra­di­tion­al and con­tem­po­rary learn­ing meth­ods.

"All ser­vice staff have com­plet­ed the ser­vice ex­cel­lence pro­gramme cer­ti­fied by the On­tario Tourism Ed­u­ca­tion Cor­po­ra­tion (OTEC). Ad­di­tion­al­ly, su­per­vi­sors/man­age­r­i­al staff are present­ly be­ing trained in a high­er lev­el pro­gramme called Ser­vice Ex­cel­lence Man­age­ment, al­so cer­ti­fied by the On­tario Tourism Ed­u­ca­tion Cor­po­ra­tion (OTEC)."

KFC:

Charles Pash­ley, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd, told the Busi­ness Guardian at the open­ing of KFC's 55th restau­rant in El Do­ra­do last Fri­day that it's im­prov­ing their cus­tomer ser­vice by train­ing em­ploy­ees.

The new restau­rant, which cost $5 mil­lion, has been out­fit­ted with chang­ing ar­eas, lock­er rooms and a space for em­ploy­ees for fur­ther ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing.

"Cur­rent­ly, our em­ploy­ees get one month's train­ing in a store be­fore they are ac­tu­al­ly put in the sys­tem, and that en­com­pass­es prod­uct and cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing. That is how we pro­vide cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing to our em­ploy­ees," he said.

Ac­counts and ICT

Boal­sa Caribbean So­lu­tions Ltd, a start up that of­fers hu­man re­source ser­vices, ac­count­ing and Web site de­sign, is one of the com­pa­nies fea­tured on doit­tri­ni.com.

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor An­na Sa­hadeo said it got new clients who saw their ads on the Web site and de­vel­oped a part­ner­ship with Cot­sys, a New Zealand ICT firm.

"Doit­tri­ni.com al­lows cus­tomers to rate ser­vices on­line. Po­ten­tial clients will be look­ing at a com­pa­ny rat­ing be­fore they con­tact them. For us it is es­sen­tial that we keep pro­vid­ing a good ser­vice. If a cus­tomer is not sat­is­fied, they may put it on­line and, of course, it will af­fect fu­ture busi­ness. The site al­so en­ables us to keep up with the com­pe­ti­tion," she said.