Sunday, June 29, 2008

Put People First

I hope that our business policies are made on the concept of "put people first", rather than "make more profit".

By putting people first, the business can still earn a good profit margin. They will get the loyalty of their customers.

Some businesses make more profit by overcharging customers or degrade the service to customers. They may reduce their expenses, but they add more cost to the customers. Some examples are:

1. SMRT reduces the number of trains during off-peak hours. The commuters have to wait longer for a train. The train will be nearly fully packed, even during the off-peak period. By adding more train, SMRT will increase its cost marginally, but it will improve the comfort level of the commuters significantly.

2. Businesses make customers waste a lot of time in navigating through their automated call center systems. It reduces the expenses to the businesses marginally, but add a lot of wasted time and telephone bills for the customers.

3. Businesses make customers wait a long time at their customer service counters. If they increase the manpower to serve customers, they may increase their cost marginally, but reduce the waiting time for customers. Wasted time is costly to customers.

If there is genuine competition, businesses will put their best effort to "put people first", so that they win over the loyalty of their customers. Unfortunately, in Singapore, many businesses are operated by near monopolies. In competitive situations, these businesses apply unfair methods to lock their customers into term contracts and then treat the customers badly during the lock-in period.

I hope that there is a stronger voice to speak for the consumers in Singapore.

5 comments:

Falcon said...

Yes, I agree. One example is I was locked into a three year broadband contract with Singtel. For nearly three years my feedback fell on deaf ears. Inspite of me having signed up for the fastest broadband they have, the speed was slow with frequent disconnections. Now finally I am nearing the expirty of the contract and they are offering many lower priced plans to me but asking me to be locked up again. No thanks, I look forward to the day when I can terminate my broadband with them and my residential line to boot.

SingaSoft said...

In true capitalism, there is no way businesses can over-charged customers, definitely not for long.

Capitalism creates material well being for society. It might look cruel sometimes, but overall it is still the best system to bring wealth to a nation.

So questions that we should constantly ask are:
1. are there enough fair competitions in the market?
2. what can we do to encourage more competitions?

If you think that competition is not enough in certain market, maybe you should suggest policies that will encourage that, rather than just say "put people first".

I think suggesting "put people first" will not really change anything.

hongjun said...

1. Off peak hours = fewer trains = packed trains = peak hours for customers

2. Complicated automated call service centres = Unnecessary wait and $ = frustrated customers = put down phone = 1 less phone to answer for companies

3. Long waiting time = frustrated customers = some systems end up telling you "thank you, please call back again" = Extremely frustrated customers

Who will listen? Who will hear?

white raven said...

Many organisations esp those serving the public, are woolly about who their real customers are. E.g. in a school, are students the end customers, in-process semifinished products, internal customers? Or shall we include their parents, society, employers, even govt? Who are the customers of a company like Singtel - the shareholders, the subscribers? Conversely, who is the NSmen (collectively) a customer of - MINDEF, CMPB, or more nebulously, the govt? When this is not clearly defined at the beginning, then no matter how all the upstream business processes are perfected, they will be wrongly directed. So no wonder that although the organisation feels that it has done a great job, somehow the feeling is not passed on to the end customer so he/she will never be happy or satisfied.

Therefore, public service bodies must firstly get their customers identified rightly. Then, they must determine what those CTQ- critical to quality- characteristics and their service levels are before engineering their key processes to deliver them. For areas where there are certainly mixed customers and some may be internal customers, organisations will have to define their needs and service standards and key processes, and perform interaction effects such as when optimising costs lead to frustrating customers with delays etc. If these are done well, corporations will be sure to make money because the happy customers will be loyal paymasters ensuring the incoming revenue streams for the companies because the latter will also have delivered value in the most optimal way.

The said...

/// Loh Hon Chun said...
Who will listen? Who will hear? ///

Hon Chun - they will listen alright - but whether their hear the messages and act on them are different things. There are many feedback mechanisms set up for this purpose.

They listen, but do not hear.
They look, but do not see.

Sad...

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