BEARING THE BRUNT OF MANAGEMENT FAILURES
DR TRILOGY
When it comes to customer care in South Africa, I am starting to realise that all companies providing a service, or a product, be it big or small, have taken a leaf out of Cyril Ramaphosa’ s book – boil the frog slowly!
This realisation hit me after an interaction with an MTN branch, and the inordinate amount of time that it took to renew a data contract. In Singapore this would have involved an online request, and it would have been solved in five minutes, max. In South Africa, it required multiple visits to a branch, that shall be nameless, and three and a half hours of my time, and a similar amount of time for the hapless employee.
Initially, I was unhappy with the employee, but as he explained, his hands were tied by procedures, and countless checks and balances, apparently to avoid fraud. All imposed by management. My mind went back to the Trilogy Customer C. A. R. E. Programme that I wrote in 1992, which was written to address the attitudes of all employees, but particularly front line staff. My point of departure was that if you got attitudes right, everything else would fall into place.
The quote I used was from Martin Luther King. He was referring to lower level workers, and how they should approach their jobs:“ He should seek to do his job so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn child could not do it better. No matter how small one thinks his life’ s work is in terms of the norms of the world and the so-called big jobs, he must realise that it has cosmic significance if he is serving humanity … if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets as Raphael painted pictures, sweep streets as Michelangelo carved marble, sweep streets as Beethoven composed music, sweep streets as Shakespeare wrote poetry.” Pretty powerful stuff, and in the right circumstances, it will move mountains. But when the mountain is management, it will just be fancy words. And with MTN, the management mountain is a huge obstacle.
So, next time you are frustrated by a seemingly uncaring front line staff member, don’ t jump the gun. The odds are that the problem lies with management, and the poor employee’ s hands have been cut off. And as Shakespeare would most probably say,“ Much ado about nothing”.
Trilogy Customer C. A. R. E. – module # 131
FRONT LINE
STAFF
BEARING THE BRUNT OF MANAGEMENT FAILURES
aBr WORDS IN ACTION 04 MAY 2025