I agree with Sunny Bindra. If everyone connected with the delivery of a service does not care, it matters not that the service provider has invested billions in facilities and employees or that it has been certified by the International Standards Organisation. I believe that there is a corollary to Mr Bindra's observation: if those on the receiving end of poor service delivery do not care either, it is unlikely, too, that the service will improve.
If we do not care enough to demand better, if we do not care enough to know what our rights are, and if we do not care enough that we are paying for poor services, those offering poor service will not improve. A simplistic argument made by members of the civil society industry is that we pay taxes, ergo we pay the salaries of public officers. It is similar to the argument made by consumer rights organisations: we pay for goods and services, ergo, those getting our custom are our "employees" and they should offer us better quality goods or services.
But our behaviour belies this neat dichotomy. Carol Musyoka, the Nitpicker, captures it neatly in this tweet. Our education system breeds conformity. It inculcates a culture of going along to get along. Few of us are willing to rock the boat when we receive shoddy service, even when we have paid through the nose for it. Last year Artcaffe, a Nairobi-based chain of high-end bistros, was accused by patrons of discriminating against "native" Kenyans, offering them poor service for the swingeing prices it charges for its fare. I do not recall the protest being widespread, except among the Twitteratti, or the proprietors of Artcaffe making any statement on whether or not they would sensitise their staff to treat all patrons with dignity and respect regardless of the colour of their skin.
The Constitution provides for consumer rights in Article 46, but you wouldn't know it by how blasé we are about asserting those rights. We have delegated the "caring" over those rights to statutory bodies and consumer rights groups. It is always some else who is responsible for guaranteeing that we receive the goods and services we have paid for are of the highest standards possible. It isn't us. We have mistaken the right to mumble an grumble for the power to compel the improvement in the quality of goods and services, forgetting that unless the poor service provider or the poor quality and substandard manufacturer of goods feels the pain of our dissatisfaction, he has no compelling reason to improve.
The only time we know a manufacturer was sued for providing substandard or contaminated goods is when we read about it in the law books. Quality control may have improved in some respects, but the fact that we are now consumers of low-quality goods without complaint is a sign that we no longer care enough to complain. Take, for example, the poor customer care offered by a leading "triple-play" provider. It has become legendary. Yet there are thousands of its customers who spend, collectively, hundreds of millions of shillings for its services who, more often than not, can only use two of its three services simultaneously without their system going on the fritz. Not one of them cares enough to sue to compel this company to do better.
Finally, we have persuaded ourselves that a boycott would be futile, especially when dealing with a dominant service provider. We rationalise it thus: as an individual, one will suffer more from not using the poor service on order, so "good enough" is good enough until that magical day that the service provider improves its service.
Mr Bindra, when both the service provider and the consumer of the service do not care about the poor quality of the service, that service is unlikely to improve. We are Siamese Twins. It is time we were surgically separated - with the five to twenty-five per cent success rate that it entails.
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