Ghana’s current Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS) now sits at 66.26 percent – an improvement on what was recorded the previous year, a 2021 Ghana Customer Service Index (GCSI) report has indicated.
Compared with 2020, the country scored 65.5 percent in CSS. This, the President of Institute of Customer Service Professionals (ICSP), Yvonne Ohui Maccarthy, has said is not enough and does not represent the country’s good name on the international front in terms of customer service; especially when Ghana’s focus on tourism continues to deepen across the world.
“This is a little rise of 1 percent from what we had last year, that is a c+; but what we are looking forward to is a time when we can boast of a B+ and above. Because you know how people talk about Ghana being the gateway to West Africa, and how people talk about the tourism that we have here. But we want to also make sure that the service we offer can or will be on par with the scores we get here,” she said.
In spite of the slow progress made from the previous years, Ms. Ohui believes there is still more room for improvement.
“It tells us there is a lot that we need to work on, because we have had c and c+ from what we are doing. So there is a lot more to do. We are looking at our satisfaction score as a country and in subsequent years; we have always been in C all the time, so let’s see if this year we move up or down – the goal is every year we move up,” she stressed.
The report also focused on the customer satisfaction for about 10 sectors in the country: which include banking, insurance, hospitality, healthcare, utilities, telecommunication, public sector, online businesses, transportation and retail malls.
The criteria for scoring these sectors were based on trust, look and feel, competence, professionalism, ease of doing business, processes and procedures and customer-focused innovations, engagement with customers, complaints and feedback, and coronavirus preparedness.
In spite of the impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality sector, respondents in the GCSI 2021 were of the view that the hospitality industry produced the best customer service within the past 12 months – making them emerge as number-one among the other sectors with 73.16 percent.
Retail malls followed with 72 percent – followed by the telecommunication sector, the banking sector, transportation, utility, insurance, health care, online businesses and the public institutions respectively.
There were a lot of surprises, especially in the banking, telecommunication and insurance sectors; where some best-performing institutions were overthrown from their positions by others with regard to their customer satisfaction.
Recommendations
To create remote contact centre operations quickly and effectively, as well as improve the relationship between employees and their customers, the 2021 GCSI report is urging organisations to adopt new ways of working – by establishing infrastructures including connectivity, secure laptops and software licencing to enable work-from-home models.
It advised that there is a need to enhance management systems by optimising contact routing configurations and extending ancillary systems to new scenarios, and enabling end-to-end security with a ‘Zero Trust’ model.
The report also recommends a modified process to implement clear policies, update internal schedules, processes and metrics; and reflect changes in published customer-facing information as well as improve contact centre management by addressing the most critical contacts first, followed by handling the less-urgent but important contacts with tools such as call-back assist.
Adding to this, the 2021 GCSI report suggests the need to lean on analytics to inform agile workforce planning and also adjust the prioritisation and distribution logic on existing platforms.
The response to this crisis is likely to accelerate the future of customer experience in categories such as agent agility, channel choice, real-time workforce management and prevalence of AI virtual agents.
And while experts may not know how long it will take to contain the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, the report urges leaders to prepare for the short-term while developing new capabilities and ways of working that can seamlessly enable longer-term operational changes.
