Champions of the TT mediocracy

PAOLO KERNAHAN

IF THE RATE of change outside your business is happening faster than the rate of change inside your business, then you're out of business.

I stumbled onto this quote recently and after chewing on it for a few seconds, it struck me how little it applies to TT.

Technology, training and new methodologies that drive advancements in socioeconomic growth elsewhere just don't apply here.

Additionally, societies in more dynamic countries are constantly reinterpreting customer service; if you want to grow, you must become better at how you treat your customers. Not here,
mon frere!

Recently I suffered an outage of internet service spanning several days. This was more than a minor hiccup, as all of my work is done online. Without the internet, I might as well be banging my head against a wall, which is precisely what I ended up doing when I made the mistake of dealing with my internet provider's customer indifference service.

What was peculiar at the outset is that the company seemed reluctant even to acknowledge there was a problem. Aside from a terse post on Facebook, there was scant detail about the cause, the extent of the disruption or even a guesstimate on when customers could expect restoration of service.

With no other way of getting information, I had to opt for the last resort – getting someone mostly passing as human on the horn to dig for some kind of hope.

What ensued was an endless succession of phone calls with customer disservice reps, each one more surly and abrupt than the next. No one had answers, nor did they seem particularly troubled by their uselessness.

It's quite unpleasant as a customer to feel you're a nuisance – a bother to someone who'd much rather be doing anything else other than their job, which is attending to you.

At every turn I was confronted with people who seem to have the worst communication skills; no communication skills would have been more acceptable in this instance. That's strikingly ironic for a company that is, broadly speaking, in the business of communication.

All told, I lost three days of work because of the internet service interruption.

I also lost much more – my mental equilibrium and focus were completely shattered by prolonged, consistently unpleasant interactions with basic, ill-mannered carbuncles who really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near customer care services.

I didn't mention the name of the service provider, because it doesn't matter. At their core, there is little difference in the quality of service, customer care and pricing from one mediocre company to the next.

So little recourse does the average consumer have that the only option is usually going to Facebook to "grass" on the offending company.

The responses you get from the social media gallery are always the same: try this one, their service is better; or: have you tried that one? I've never had a problem with them.

This is a small market, and certainly, in my case, I had already fled the providers everyone is confidently suggesting on account of similar issues.

Often, a well-meaning person would private-message me the contact information of someone to help out of a jam. While appreciated, this workaround affirms the contactocracy that corrupts society – you need to know someone to get through, rather than have people simply do what they're paid to.

Trinis don't even realise how we make accommodations for downright bad products and dreadful customer service by jumping from one business to the next, hoping for better outcomes. In our cartel culture, competition is the real C-word. There is a homogeneity of misery in the consumer experience.

Businesses won't invest in the right training for employees to face the public. They won't do it because they know consumers have limited options. Perhaps business owners believe the customers are just as coarse and primitive as the people they hire, given that they come from the same stunted society, so what's the big deal?

Companies, entrepreneurs...the average worker – so many of us are enthusiastic practitioners of the mediocrity that defines our condition. We heap enmity and our frustrations on failing, corrupt and morally bankrupt politicians.

Society doesn't accept, though, that appalling standards of leadership and ingenuity in our governance are near-echoes of who we are as a people.

If we as a nation aren't inspired to do better, to ask more of ourselves and learn from our shortcomings and failures, then we don't have the right to demand excellence from those we choose to lead us.