Growth & Jobs | Good customer service allows for business continuity – Brown-Roberts

Bad customer service can prove to be very costly for a business, and this is especially the case today because of the myriad of social media platforms available for individuals to share their grouses.

Given the ease at which customers can be turned off from doing business with an organisation, Information Technology and Customer Support Services Manager at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Janice Brown-Roberts, believes customer service agents should endeavour to ensure equity of service and must be willing to go the extra mile. She believes excellent customer service is one of the key strategies for business continuity and sustainability.

“Always seek to acquire the knowledge that would provide the information that your customer needs, and if you don’t know, ask, because it is always better to ask a question rather than to provide the wrong information that would therefore result in frustration and misinformation for your customer,” she advised.

In an effort to improve the work standards, professionalism and excellence in service delivery, Brown-Roberts, who heads the User Support Services at the Mona Information Technology Services (MITS), established the Past Intern Knowledge Empowerment (PIKE) annual professional training seminar in 2015. PIKE engages past student workers to participate in the training seminar in order to enrich the customer experience and marketability of student workers in training at MITS.

“At least one past student who was a part of our internship programme, I invite back to come and impart knowledge in relation to professionalism and various topics that would add value to the customer experience, and also building the marketability of these students who are presently in training, because we have a dynamic internship programme,” explained Brown-Roberts.

MITS employs up to 86 student workers annually.

“I am building a network of young professionals who will be going out into the wider work world to add value, and so the fact that they are part of the information and communications technology team, they would also add value to the university’s brand,” she said.

“It’s a win for them as a university student to be a cut above the rest when they acquire these marketable skills. Other than just having a first degree and a second degree, they would have other skills, such as being tactful,” she added.

Brown-Roberts, who has been working at the UWI for over 25 years, has been a manager and a trainer for 15 of those years. Her focus has been on reinforcing best practice techniques, such as quality assurance, workload balancing, workforce optimisation, process management, stress management, personality building, emotional intelligence and human capacity building.

“I find it really fulfilling to serve our student workers in this capacity of training because now, I find that as those gone by move into different entities, persons are now asking me if we have persons to supply them with,” she said.

“All customers are different and so we have to develop the empathy, patience, courtesy and all of those things required to deal with the various personalities,” she noted.