Sunday, August 07, 2005
| bad service We've been grumbling about Singapore's poor service standards for decades. Will we ever improve? Weekend • August 6, 2005 Tan Hui Leng huileng@newstoday.com.sg IS it money? Training? Or is it simply our culture, something sadly Singaporean? Bad service in Singapore's retail sector has been a problem for as long as anyone can remember. Complaints about poor service make up a good many of the letters Today receives each day. Rude counter staff, aggressive food stall workers, disappearing taxi drivers, ignorant sales assistants, indifferent after-sales service – the lack of regard for customer service seems to be endemic to Singapore. And it is not just a long-standing problem but also a growing one. In 1998, Singapore placed eighth in the World Economic Forum's customer orientation rankings. Last year, we had fallen to 21. What's wrong? We have been wringing our hands about our poor service for decades. Why can't we get it right? Now that we're making an all-out effort to reinvent ourselves as a tourist destination, with integrated resorts and other exciting plans, should we not be making a concerted effort to start getting it right? Most importantly, how can we turn our bad service into good service? ~~~~~~~~~~~ Money, for many people, is a great motivator. As a 23-year-old sales assistant put it: "Everybody works for money. You pay more, you get better quality sales staff and better service." A recent international study found that salespeople in Singapore, like their counterparts in the US, UK and the Philippines, put money at the top of the list of motivating factors. Salespeople in Australia and Norway, in contrast, said they were driven by lifestyle considerations such as opportunities to use their abilities and freedom from routine. The study was conducted in 2003 by Baylor University and Behavioral Sciences Research Press in the US. So is money the answer? Are we simply not paying frontline service staff enough? Wages for waiters and sales assistants range from $4.50 an hour to $6 an hour, so the average frontline worker earns a basic monthly wage in the $900 to $1,000 range. Many employers have some kind of commission scheme, so the gross monthly pay will be slightly higher. According to the Workforce Development Agency (WDA), retail assistants make from $934 to $1,633 (gross) a month. These commission schemes are a key factor in raising service standards, says compensation specialist Mr Peter Lee who has been designing wage systems for the last 25 years. "Incentives are the most important push factors for better service quality," said the managing consultant of Data Remuneration Specialists, a 15-year-old consultancy that specialises in pay consultation and counts Robinsons and Cold Storage as its clients. "A good salesperson will always be looking for incentive opportunities and he would be willing to take a lower guaranteed salary with higher commission opportunities," added Mr Lee. But just having a commission scheme may not be enough; what's needed is a tiered commission structure that motivates employees both on an individual and a group level, said Mr Lee. Many Singapore employers are still using the traditional straight commission structure, where a 1 to 5 per cent commission is distributed to all sales staff from a department's total sales. Some shops impose a sales target before this is paid out. Said Mr Lee: "The commission earned from such a system is not adequate. It does not generate enough income in most cases. It may also prompt salespeople to hard sell so as to generate more income from the floor commission." Another drawback of the straight commission system is that underperforming members of the team get the same amount as the hard workers. TIERED COMMISSIONS One employer that uses the tiered commission system is The Robinson Group, which adopted the method when its former chief executive Peter Husum came onboard in 1990. The result: Robinsons' service standards are widely considered to be among the best in Singapore. With a tiered scheme, a straight commission of 1 to 5 per cent is paid when a certain sales target is met. Beyond this target, when the profit margin for the company will be higher, a higher commission is paid – even as high as 30 percent, said Mr Lee. For the small retailers – and some 90 percent of Singapore's 19,700 retailers employ less than 10 staff – Mr Lee recommends a simpler scheme: A lower basic wage and a higher commission rate. He said: "Of course you need to pay them a fixed salary because you need someone there to tend the shop but instead of $1,000 with 1 per cent commission, you could half that fixed pay but let them take home up to $1,000 in commission instead." This is easier said then done. In an informal poll TODAY conducted of some 60 retail workers, most agreed that a higher commission would indeed encourage them to provide good service. But they would not want their basic wage to be cut "as it is already very low". IMAGE ISSUE For Mr K C Loh, a business consultant who for some years ran the Retail Promotion Centre under Spring Singapore, it's a chicken and egg problem. Standards will not rise in the service sector if it does not have good people, that is, people who have the skills and personal attributes for good service. To attract the right people, the retail sector will have to offer better salaries, and it also needs a better image. "One signal that has been constantly sent out unintentionally is that the service sector is what you can consider if you are retrenched or out of a job," said Mr Loh. "If you perpetuate the image that service is the last option or an interim option, then you will not get qualified, good quality people to go into it." But are there enough good people out there? No, says Mr Tommy Ng, executive director of Raffles Knowledge, which does training for the hospitality industry. "There is now a limited pool of good quality people for the job and that is the fundamental problem. Even if I pay more, I'm not going to get better people." He champions job restructuring so that a job has higher value, such as combining a waiter's job with that of a sommelier. Then, you can pay him more." Mr Ng, who sits on many wage and job restructuring boards, thinks that eventually, Singapore may have to go the Swiss way – have foreigners do the serving while locals take higher value jobs. He thinks this is the inevitable trend, though it is at least one generation away. SERVICE SINGAPORE-STYLE In the food and beverage sector, an easy answer might be to return to the tipping system. One advocate is Prof Wee Chow Hou, head of Nanyang Technological's Business School's division of strategy. "You can definitely feel the difference when you travel to a country with a tipping culture," said Prof Wee. "A waiter may be waiting on a few tables but he is able to answer questions about the food, make recommendations, and initiates follow-up with you during the meal. Here, they often do not know enough about their own menus and ignore you after taking your orders. The big difference is that overseas, they have to work harder for their tips." Prof Wee suggested that the current 10 percent service charge be lowered gradually to ease the country into a tipping culture. In TODAY's poll of F&B staff, all but one waiter said they would work a lot harder if they got to keep their tips. But if the service charge is removed, will the Singaporean customer tip? Or will we just enjoy the lower bill and ignore the efforts of waiters? To what extent is the poor service we complain about the result of our attitudes to service staff, a reflection of a wider problem – the lack of graciousness in Singapore society? Mr K C Loh thinks that Singaporeans' reticence and language skills could be a reason why service appears to be so bad. "If the service worker cannot communicate well, he could come across as rude or impatient," he said. "Employers' stress on efficiency and speed has also created a work culture whereby good customer service is equated with efficiency, and not necessarily with care and courtesy," said Helen Lim Yang of Manpower Consultancy. Added Singapore Management University's Practice Associate Professor of Marketing Thomas Tan: "East Asians do not have a civic culture like that in the West where they see one another as equals; we see service staff as being servile." | |
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