How am I really doing or how to improve customer service the Chinese way
Raju Narisetti -
Friday, September 26, 2008 7:59 AM
A lot of ink, digital or otherwise, has been devoted in recent years to comparing India and China, especially in terms of infrastructure--or lack of and their abundance of wide roads, large airports...
But what is less talked about is how both countries are taking very different approaches to customer service, especially in terms of government services and how they are delivered to citizens.
Take a simple example of airports. At most Chinese airports, immigration counters have what I consider a very effective way of providing feedback to the government. This is what it looks like:
Sorry about the fuzzy picture--I wasn't sure I was allowed to take pictures of the immigration counter and took a quick one with my Blackberry.
Essentially, it is a small device that faces you and says "You can comment on my work here." There are four buttons ranging from Greatly Satisfied (green smiley face) to Poor Customer Service (black frown face). So as soon as you are done at the immigration counter, you have a choice of pushing one of those buttons to provide direct feedback. Given that it also captures the time when a button was pushed, it potentially allows a database to match the feedback to specific immigration officers. Simple and direct, easy to use and avoids any personal interaction (often an inhibiting factor in providing feedback, especially to government officials) with the immigration officer as the device faces you and is out of the officer's sight.
Doesn't it seem like a simple, elegant way to get service quality feedback at our own airport immigration counters and elsewhere? It is much better than those painted phone numbers and mailing addresses that we find (if you look hard enough) at airports that tell us where to complain/compliment--assuming we really have the time and inclination.
We can tout all of the virtues of our democracy versus China's calibrated capitalism model but to the Romantic Realist, this seems like one smart, democratic tool that we could borrow from China.