SERVICEWISE - The Moment of Truth

No, it’s not the TV game show. Though why an individual would stand before millions of people to admit to matters that could potentially lead to character and career suicide is a question best answered by the participants themselves.

The ‘moment of truth’ I refer to is a terminology in customer service that describes any point during the interaction between an organization and its customers that leaves a lasting positive or negative impression about the business. In the hospitality industry, for instance, this would include, but not be limited to, booking the room, check-in, check-out, dinner reservations, dinner ordering, dinner presentation, quality and quantity of food and so on.

Why does it matter?

It matters for three major reasons:

1.      The customer has changed: In the past, it used to be that a business just produced products for the customer and the customer just had to take it or leave it. In the event that the customer did decide to leave it, the business would just make a better product. Nowadays, customers are more educated, better informed, more value conscious and demand more for their money. Their expectations of the companies and the people they buy from are much higher and the internet has brought more options literally to their doorsteps. They want better customer service and when they don’t get it, a typical dissatisfied customer will tell an average of 7 to 10 people about his problem and why they shouldn’t patronise you.

2.      The business environment has changed: Unless an organization has a monopoly in its industry, businesses today have more competition and globalization has ensured that this competition is not only local but regional and international. If you don’t offer superior service to your customer, they’ll just waltz over to someone who did, and wouldn’t mind paying the difference. That’s your money going to someone else simply because they performed better.

3.      The World Economy: The recession hit a lot of businesses pretty hard and so money is spent with a great deal more discretion. It doesn’t leave that much available for elaborate marketing strategies to attract new customers. The funny thing is, it has been statistically proven that it costs way less to maintain an existing customer than to get a new one.

So how do you determine this ‘moment of truth’?

·        Break down each process involved in the customer experience into its component stages to see where you can save your customer time or money. The best way is to ‘walk a mile in your customer’s shoes’. This is known as Mystery Shopping. A lot of businesses get expert help to pose as a customer and observe employee treatment and operational bottlenecks. You can simply get an informed friend to help out and then discover at which points your customer can potentially be frustrated. This Business Process Mapping can help you identify where money should be channelled and energies exerted.

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     Ask your frontline staff. Employees see first-hand the body language, nonverbal communication of the customer and the circumstances surrounding the particular incident, things that surveys will never see and that customers will sometimes not realise is happening.

Excellent customer service has the advantage of not only being an effective marketing tool but also a unique selling point for any company. By understanding the moments of truth, you can improve and even determine the perceptions of your customers. This would lead to positive word of mouth advertising and customer loyalty.

FROM THE HEART OF A YOUNG NIGERIAN MOTHER - Meet Rosemary Siggins, A Mom and a Half

Let me introduce you to a woman who helps me understand that, though I have a lot to deal with as a working 21st century mum, I've got what it takes to make it.

She is less than two feet tall but she remodels cars. She walks with her arms and rides a skateboard. Her name is Rosemary Siggins and she only has half a body.

Imagine a Barbie doll. Now imagine it with its legs taken out, leaving just the torso. That’s what Rose looks like.

Rose was born with a rare genetic disorder called Sacral Agenesis. This means that there was an abnormal development of her lower spine. Because her legs were severely deformed at birth and Rose was in danger of harming herself, her mother, after consulting several doctors, decided to have them amputated when Rose was two years old.

For years, she was forced to wear artificial limbs in a bid to make her look like everyone else. She rebelled when she was in the eighth grade and turned up for school one day on a skateboard. She insisted she wanted to be normal and refused to use a wheelchair. This meant that Rose uses her hands to move from place to place.

Rose met her husband Dave in 1997 and married him two years later; two years after that she discovered that she was pregnant. It was unprecedented for a woman in her condition to carry a baby to term, much less successfully deliver one. Only one doctor was willing to support the couple’s decision to have the baby as the foetus grew transversely, unlike normal pregnancies. Rose successfully delivered a baby boy and a few years later, a baby girl was added to the family.

After her mother lost the battle to cancer, Rose was faced with the added responsibility of not only running that family automobile business, but also looking after her mentally handicapped bother and her father who has Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.

This Colorado native cooks for her family and cleans her house. She goes to her local supermarket to buy her groceries. She gets her kids ready for school and drives a car she and her father adapted with hand controls for her use.

Her bravery, sadly, is not without a price. Walking with her hands means that she has been using her shoulder joints like a pelvis. This has led to a lot of wear, resulting in a weakening of her joints. Rose will eventually have to use a wheel chair to take the pressure off them.

Her response to her situation is this: "A lot of people with disabilities feel that life owes them something, and I was raised in a way that no, no-one owes you a dime. The world doesn't owe you anything, this is what you have and you use your resources and you get through life. My personal opinion is, get up and go for it, just do it." 

It was William James who said,”The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.”

Rose Siggins; wife, mother, business owner and primary caregiver has certainly made this discovery. I hope you do too.

Sources: UK Channel 5’s Series ‘Extraordinary People’

              THS Investigates (E! Entertainment Network Documentary)

FROM THE HEART OF A YOUNG NIGERIAN MOTHER - Make Dinner a little Different

We were recently hosted to dinner by a couple who were clients of my husband’s. The husband was a naturalized British man, born and bred in Northern Nigeria and spoke English, French and Hausa fluently. The wife was from the Niger Delta and hundred percent home grown.

Dinner, when it was ready was a choice of French fries and ketchup or Egyptian rice and oregano flavoured meat sauce with vegetable salad and chicken kebab.

Predictably, I concluded that the variety was in deference to her husband’s palate but was assured by the wife that her he could down ‘eba’ and ‘ila asepo’ with the best of them. It was her love for change that made her surf the internet for different recipes to prepare for him. He had already sampled her boeuf stroganoff and loved it.

                                                                                       

It got me thinking that since information is so easily exchanged nowadays, so much so that we have now coined the term ‘global village’ for the world, food, like information now comes without borders. So there is certainly nothing stopping me from presenting the same or similar fare to my family once in a while.

So, why not give your family a break from the same old, same old of rice, beans, eba and  amala, and try simple recipes like chicken nuggets with rice or chips or spaghetti bolognaise. Some useful websites are:

www.allrecipes.com

www.a1cookrecipes.com

www.vitalrecepies.com

Some of the ingredients needed are optional. Some are also not common but can be obtained in any of our larger supermarkets. Besides, it’s only once in a while so go ahead and spoil your family. They deserve it!

FROM THE HEART OF A YOUNG NIGERIAN MOTHER - Tips for Raising Your Kids in the Jet Age

‘A wise son makes a glad father but a foolish one is the heaviness of the mother’ Proverbs 10:1

 There’s a joke that says when a woman says a child is hers, it’s a statement of fact; but when a man says a child is his, it’s a statement of faith. It seems unfair but whether we like it or not, the burden of raising children rests squarely on the mother’s shoulders as by default, she gets to spend more time with the kids.

Nowadays, not only does home and career vie for her attention, she has the added concern of the amount of information her children get exposed to. Thanks to the internet, the television and other media, she can worry that one day, 4-year-old Tunde might ask her, ‘mummy, why are that mummy and daddy fighting on the bed?’

Here are a few tips that might help you:

• ·         Take control. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all that needs doing but you must be on top of your children’s upbringing.
• ·         Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Sometimes, you only have to say the word and you can get great advice from experienced mums.
• ·         Give your children boundaries. I once met a mother who did not allow her 10-year-old to watch High School Musical because guess what, her child is not yet in Secondary School. Be a friend to your children, but you’re first of all their mother.
• ·         Let them never doubt that you love them.
• ·         Get involved in special projects with them to create ‘mummy and me’ times.
• ·         Pray and get wisdom from the Bible.

FROM THE HEART OF A YOUNG NIGERIAN MOTHER - The Culture Conflict

We’ve all been there. As parents, we remember our sense of pride and accomplishment when our child said his first word; as if it was something we did that made it happen. It not only marked for us a milestone in his development, but finally, we would be able to make sense of something he is saying. It heralded the end of our frustration of having to guess and reduced the number of trials and errors.

If we think about it, though, ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ from our little angel’s lips inspires infinitely more positive feelings than ‘mama’ or ‘baba’, unless we don’ speak English anyway and so we really don’t care.

These days I find my contemporaries faced with the same conflict. Ever wondered how your parents did it so that you not only spoke English fluently but your mother tongue as well? I certainly never gave it much thought…, until I became a mother myself and found myself asking my husband how we expected our children to learn Yoruba (our mother tongue) if we and everyone around them (even their grandparents who we rely upon to anchor us to our traditions) speak only English to them.

‘Why does it matter?’ you may ask. In today’s Nigeria, it’s not likely to make that much of a difference outside the home, particularly since our country is distinguished by its ethnic diversity and the only way we can understand what each other is saying is by speaking English (or pidgin English, which is definitely not anyone’s mother tongue, though some people may beg to differ!)

Consider for a moment that if our ethnicity is so important to us, our language is a big part of it. If then the succeeding generations have Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, or any of our many other indigenous languages deleted from their education and vocabulary, aren’t we becoming complicit in erasing a vital part of our identity?

Yes, we give our children foreign names. We all have our reasons for that, and it is a good way to celebrate the good in other cultures; and yes, some of our ‘country people’ beyond our shores have not done much to make us proud of our nationality. It doesn’t change the fact that we have a responsibility to not only our forebears, but to that which puts us on the map of the world.

Our children cannot learn it in school from their Yoruba or Igbo teachers who only expose them to the language twice a week. It comes down to us, mummy, daddy, grandpa, grandma and our ethnic community. Learning about where they are from, like charity, can only begin at home.