Customer Service and Human Rights

Jun 18, 2020 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

As an octogenarian with more physical indispositions, including poor vision, with which I can cope, it is not feasible for me to go ‘online’. I still have to resort to appropriately expert help to transform my manuscript to meet the technological requirements.
Alone, I reflect on how many variations of this theme exist, but for whom I feel compelled to speak. I keep wondering how we must cope with all the recordings to which we must now listen from our ‘service’ providers only to hear at the end how busy they are and will return the call at some indefinite later time.
My reflections take me back to 1965 when I opened my first bank account with the Royal Bank of Guyana, a colonial edifice truly represented at the managerial levels; while clerks were all adequately light-skinned. As it turned out I was then the youngest local executive in then Bookers Sugar Estates – the reason I was welcomed by the Bank Manager who personally documented the opening of my first account. It was the Booker connection that influenced such an expeditious exercise, and indeed other later encounters. Yet one came away with the satisfaction of being known as a person, an authentic customer.
It has been virtually the same experience throughout most of the years of my ‘banking’ life – indeed up to last year when I had coffee with one manager whom I got to know as a person. He was about to leave the job because, amongst his reasons, the human contact was drying up in face of advancing technology. I could not help agreeing with him, young as he was comparatively.
So I continue to ponder on the inherent distancing between service providers and their unrecognisable clients – contradictorily expressing their concern for the caller in a recording that exasperatingly proclaims how ‘important’ the unidentified ‘customer’ is to their unidentified selves.
Almost irrelevantly perhaps, advantage is being taken of the COVID-19 crisis to increase the distancing between providers (even possibly in breach of implied contracts) and dear (online) customer. So there is the puzzlement in this situation as to the extent to which the two are ‘in line’ with each other.
From this personal generational perspective, it would appear that in the current environment inheres more than a little authoritarianism in the attitude of the provider in his/her relationship with the ineffectual ‘customer’. In brief, the customer has no say – particularly in the case of relationship with our banks – a situation which, regrettably, is being totally overlooked by the Bank of Guyana.
So just what is left of our human rights in this pandemic environment?

E.B. John

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