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Digicel Woes in Trinidad

The following article was printed in the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, and I thought it was a useful follow-up to my prior post:

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060203/social/social3.html

Digicel woos T&T’s media
published: Friday | February 3, 2006

Barbara Ellington, Lifestyle Editor


Digicel’s head of public relations, Maureen Rabbitt, chats with Marlan Hopkinson of Trinidad’s Power 106 I95 FM. Mr. Hopkinson was one of five media representatives from the twin-island republic who visited the island as guests of Digicel last week. – RUDOLPH BROWN/CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER

DIGICEL JAMAICA Limited last week hosted a five-member delegation of print and electronic media journalists from Trinidad and Tobago. The purpose of the visit was to give the journalists a first-hand look at their Jamaican operations and high level of acceptance it receives from the population.

When they return to Trinidad they will then be in a position to report to Trinidad on their findings about Digicel, who are currently waiting on interconnectivity licence to operate in Trinidad. They hope to be up and running in the twin-island state by April this year.

Since Digital’s entry into the Jamaican telecommunications landscape just under five years ago, they have aggressively gone after majority market share and toppled the previous monopoly owner Cable and Wireless from their number one spot. They have since gained a foothold in several other islands and last year bought Cingulair’s share of the Caribbean cellular market.

SEEN AS AGGRESSIVE

But the road to success in Trinidad has not yet been duplicated, particularly because Digicel is seen as aggressive and TSTT, the reigning cellular provider, is seen as an institution.

“Trinidadians have the attitude that ‘we have problems with TSTT, but it’s ours, so ease off, Digicel’,” Marlan Hopkinson of radio I95 FM told The Gleaner.

Mr. Hopkinson said further that TSTT has embarked on a massive multimillion-dollar campaign, using popular personalities to spread anti-Digicel rhetoric.

————————————————————–

I somehow don’t think that Digicel is seen, or has tried to portray itself, as a Caribbean institution. In the Trinidadian press, the descriptions of Digicel have said more about its obviously Irish roots and ownership, than the fact that the company was started in Jamaica by Irish entrepreneurs.

Also, Digicel (as far as I can tell from the outside) seems intent on hiring non-Caribbean nationals to its highest positions across the region, and therefore keeps reinforcing the image that it is an Irish company. In Trinidad, the whole Irish/Jamaican combination has not gone down well. It only added fuel to the fire created by the mess that the company made in the West Indies cricket sponsorship debacle.

A recent article I read (that I now cannot find) predicted that Digicel will not come close to gaining the kind of market share it did in Jamaica. We shall see.

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Small Market Marketing

Reflections on Small Country Customer Service vs. “Modern” Customer Service.

Recently, my colleagues and I have been giving thought to the idea that the Caribbean as a “single” market is a different animal from the mass markets of North America and the EU. Obviously, the size differences are tremendous — the CSME countries represent a market of only 6 million or so. What is not so obvious is that a single “geographic” market of 6 million
is also very different from a group of island markets, the largest of which has 2.6 million. In addition, island markets which insist on maintaining their political and cultural autonomy further emphasize the psychological distance.

The practical result is that managers in the region must think about customer behaviour quite differently. The way that First World managers think will not work in the Caribbean, if the hope is to increase the market share and profits. There are three hidden assumptions that underly the prevailing thinking of how customers in mass retail markets behave that just do not apply.

Myth #1: Customers are Customers for Just a Moment

In a true mass market there is a limit to which one will go to serve a customer. After all, it makes no economic sense to give too much time, attention and energy to a single person when there are many others (millions of others) right behind them. “It would just not be fair to everyone else,” the logic goes.

Therefore, interactions tend to be brief. While the hope is that the maximum value possible will be extracted (from their wallet) there is also a feeling that Customer Service Representative (CSR) productivity must be maximized by increasing the number of people they deal with. In this particular frame of mind, the customer is something to be processed, rather than a person to be connected with.

This is fine, as far as it goes, for a large market in which customers have been conditioned over time to be treated in this way. However, in a Caribbean market it’s quite jarring to be treated like this. Recently, on a series of Digicel customer service phone calls I had the overwhelming impression that they were more interested in keeping the call short than in serving my needs. I imagined that some training had been imported from Canada or someplace, and that the operators were “being incentivized” with bonuses linked to lower call-times.


Myth #2: Customers Are Strangers

Of course, in a mass market, there is no way to get to know millions of people. Instead, front- line staff is trained to deliver a kind of “fake-friendliness” that a Caribbean-grown, first-time visitor to Miami often confuses with authentic caring. There is the smile, the cheery greeting, and the well-trained question — “How can I help you?”

However, two seconds after the transaction is over, everything disappears as the “fake-friendliness” is turned on to the next customer and the prior customer melts into the mass of invisible strangers. I remember being amazed when I lived in the US that a store attendant with whom I had a long conversation would, five minutes later, not recognize who I was when I walked passed them in the mall. For them, the interaction was indeed the first and the last encounter.

In the Caribbean, there is a different belief at play, which is much closer to the notion that when I meet someone for the first time it is just a beginning.

In social settings, we Caribbean people are often amazed upon meeting someone for the first time that we have not met before! Sometimes, we insist that we must have met, and commence a playful game of “Where Do I Know You From?” If time and circumstances permit, and we are sure that there has been no prior visual contact, then the next game we play some version of “Who Do We Know in Common?”

If that game fails to yield a result, a warm game of “Who Do You Remind Me Of?” can be used to round out the conversation. By the end, a tremendous amount of information has been shared that allows for a second, future meeting to be one that now takes place between acquaintances, and sometimes friends.

In other words, that first encounter is the first…. and it is understood to be the first of many.

Once again, it’s jarring to run into a Caribbean person who acts as if the customer is a stranger. A few months ago on a flight I ran into a BWIA flight attendant I’ve seen at various fetes for years, and got “fake-friendly” treatment. (I know there could be many explanations for why this happened.) I played along by falling into my US/North American “stranger as customer” mode, for the first time outside of that country — and it felt quite foreign.


Myth #3: Some Customers are More Valuable Than Others

The idea of a retail mass-market conjures up the image of millions and millions of people who are potential customers. The first strategy that the thinking mind employs to deal with the idea of marketing to so many, is to segment these millions into manageable mental buckets.

Once the bucketing starts, the prioritization soon follows as it seems to make good sense to maximize sales by directing more attention to those customers with deeper pockets — all the better to extract more sales for the company. This works to some degree in mass markets as the sheer number of customers prevents much coordinated action to be taken, unless there is the kind of extreme neglect or abuse that leads to class-action lawsuits.

However, it is a mistake to think that our consumer markets in the Caribbean operate in this manner. Our markets are small in number, and located on islands for the most part. There is a fixed number of people to meet and greet with, and no-one is more than 3 degrees of separation away from anyone else. (This is why the game of “Who Do We Know In Common?” can be so fruitful.)

One of my clients has been wondering, in exactly the same way that companies in mass markets do, whether or not the company should shed its “unprofitable” customers. I guess this means that they are considering ending their relationship with them.

However, in our micro-markets you don’t really end relationships. They can be altered, however, and it is much easier to make them worse than it is to make them better. Furthermore, the close-knit nature of our societies means that an unprofitable customer can be more influential than they seem.

It would be a mistake to systematically rid the company of customers, who may well turn out to be the head of a PTA or a Deacon in a large church, or the cousin of the head of conglomerate, or the neighbourhood “teh-teh” (gossip.) In such cases, the profit that can be made from a single customer is only a single measure of who they really are, and their value to the institution. By and large, Caribbean want to do business with people, and not institutions, Conversely, they want to be treated like people also, and do not want to be treated as disposable profit-centres.

Digicel’s entry into Trinidad seems to have engendered the kind of resistance that I can only ascribe to a severe misunderstanding of the market they are dealing with. At the moment, Trinis are unified in a way they have never been before by virtue of gaining a berth in the upcoming World Cup in Germany. Also, TSTT is not quite equivalent to Cable and Wireless. The difference is that TSTT is not a foreign company, being owned by the government, and also that the name TSTT carries within it the name of the country – Trinidad.

The Digicel backlash in Trinidad at the moment is palpable.

On a recent trip I was told by several people that they would never get a Digicel phone, based on the Digicel advertisements in the press and the aggressive recruiting currently underway for local talent. Digicel’s service is not due to become operational until April 2006, and already the news that Digicel is sponsoring Carnival events and bands had some of my friends rolling their eyes with nothing short of disgust.

Of course, I can’t tell whether or not any of the 3 Myths mentioned above were believed in this particular case, but I do know that the Trinis who I heard complaining were not angry at a corporate oversight, but were reacting to something like a personal insult.

Such is the fate of companies that are unable or unwilling to understand the unique nature of our Caribbean markets.


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Tough Times in Creating the Customer Experience

Customer pees in bank

BY KRISTY RAMNARINE

An elderly woman who could no longer control her bladder, urinated in the waiting area of the Independence Square branch of RBTT yesterday afternoon.

Eyewitnesses said the woman asked a teller to use the staff washroom because she needed to go very badly.

However, the woman, who was standing fourth away from the counter in a very long line, was reportedly told she could not use the bank’s facilities but could go to the KFC outlet next door.

A few minutes later, the woman went to a corner of the room, stooped, pulled down her clothes and urinated on the floor.

Other customers who were in the bank were reportedly shocked at what the woman did, but some supported her.

The incident caused a few customers to raise their voice in defence of the woman, who, after she finished relieving herself, rejoined the line to make her transaction.

The bank’s cleaners were then called to mop up the floor.

After finishing the transaction, the woman left without being questioned by security.

Contacted yesterday, head of corporate communication at RBTT, Paul Charles, said the incident was an unfortunate one which the bank wished could have been avoided.

©2004-2005 Trinidad Publishing Company Limited

From the RBTT website:

“Welcome to the #1 … banking group”

and

“Building and maintaining long-term customer relationships based on mutual respect, trust, a superior service and confidence therefore remains the cornerstone of RBTT’s strategy.”

Yikes.

P.S. Since writing this post I have come to learn that this has also happened in other banks across the region, all coming from the need for banks to maintain security by limiting access to rest-rooms located behind the tellers.

Given the damage that it causes to the customer’s experience, is this really worth it?

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Mastery, and My Plumber

Mastery, and My Plumber

It’s strange what having a blog does to the mind.

It’s now 3:21 am and I’m wide awake with a blog on the mind. In case you’re new to blogging, no, it doesn’t mean anything illegal, immoral or fattening. This has more to do with having a need to write, and for me, blogging fills the space between having a swirl of thoughts buzzing around in my head, and some end-product like a white paper or published article.

The thoughts I had in mind came from 2 meetings I had on consecutive days this week, both of which went better than I thought they would.

One was a workshop with some managers, and the other was a speech. In both cases, I was the one in the front of the room with the PowerPoint presentation. One audience had about 20 people, while the other had about 200.

In both cases I entered that elusive “zone” in which I found myself completely enjoying what I was doing. Time seemed to fly. My shoulder, which includes a recently dislocated collar bone, stopped hurting. I was accompanied by 2 of my best friends in life, a consultant and my wife. One event was in Barbados and the other was in Jamaica (I did a lot of flying to attend the two.) They were very different in design also, with one designed as a facilitated workshop lasting over 5 hours with a client, and the other being a pure speech given in about 35 minutes to the Jamaica Customer Service Association’s (JCSA’s ) annual conference.

In both cases I used ideas that are presented in my blog. They were thrown out into the world in this space as infant thoughts, and then grew into adolescence in subsequent entries before being tried on live human beings.

I felt a feeling of what I can only call mastery.

Which brings me to my plumber….

My plumber is someone that I knew as a teenager, from my days attending Mona Baptist Church. He was called in by my mother (who happens to be my landlady) to fix a bath-tub leak and a toilet that would not stop running.

After he had done the repairs, we asked whether or not he had a replacement tip for the faucet in the kitchen. It seems that the prior tenants, in their desire to leave with as little as possible while taking as much as possible, seemed to have made off with the tip of the faucet that regulates the water flow. The result is a constant and too-strong flow of water that wets the unsuspecting user, frequently with water that is uncomfortably hot.

Well, as we’d say in Jamaica, “who ask me fi ask him about dat?”

He responded with a lengthy lecture on the need to replace the spout also, because they do not sell the tip separately. Furthermore, he informed us that we had what I’ll call “the Briggston Company A Type” (the true name was lost as soon as it was said.) that was brought to Jamaica in the 1960’s and he used to get it then from Mr. Bowen on King Street, and he in turn brought it to Jamaica at my plumber’s request, which he used to do from time to time based on unusual needs. Furthermore, this maker had a particular seal at the bottom of the spout that was superior, so over time this became the most popular faucet in Jamaica.

(I am clearly not doing justice to the complexity of the subject, and this I say without irony.)

He clearly knew his stuff.

And he truly wanted me to see the world that he sees: I see tip-less faucet, and he sees a world behind that faucet that comes from being someone who loves what he does.

Yesterday while I was preparing to give my JCSA speech my wife realized that she knew the woman sitting next to her.

Actually, it was the woman who recognized us, when we didn’t. She asked us if we came into the HiLo supermarket at Manor Park and we said yes, we did. Then it clicked. She remembered us from a 3 minute interaction in which my wife asked her what the appropriate tip would be for the fellows who take the groceries to the car (just as they do in some places in Florida, but not in the N.E. USA.) She remembered us from then, and while we were laughing at the coincidence I told her that her particular HiLo was the cleanest supermarket and best laid out I’d been in since I’ve returned to Jamaica.

She took the compliment in stride, and without batting an eyelid she asked: “Is there anything you’d like to see us improve?”

I was taken aback. She repeated the question a few times to make sure that I was not just stupid, but the truth was that I could not think of a single thing.

My barber is another one… he loves what he does enough to have left a secure job at the top-rated barber in Kingston (Upper Cuts) to open his own shop just across the street from me. His place is impeccable, incidentally. He, of course, always looks sharp.

And he put me on to a lady who sells replacement parts for my own clipper, which I sorely needed at the time.

My plumber. The HiLo lady. The barber across the street.

They are all people who love what they are doing, and relish the challenge of it, and seeking to master their own corner of the universe.

None of them is rich from what I could tell (my plumber must take a bus to get around town.)

Yet, I’ve worked in corporations with people who earn hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) who hate what they do, and have convinced themselves that they cannot stop doing it. And there are a LOT more people like that than there are masters.

A recent survey in the U.S. showed that some 40%+ of employees are “doing just enough work to keep their jobs.”

But this blog isn’t about them, it’s about the few who dare to fall in love with what they do for a living. They do so in spite of what the cynics around them have to say. They seek out ways and means to fall in love over and over again with their work, by continually expanding their knowledge, broadening their experience and trying out new ideas.

I’m aspiring to have more and more of these masters in my life. They are not only more skilled than their counterparts, but they are likely to open up a sizeable gap over others who are not so in love with what they do.

In reflecting on the last few days, I realized that I could only deliver the workshop I gave to my client and the speech I gave yesterday because of the following truths: the material for the workshop was developed and created by me over 7 years ago, and I’ve been practicing it diligently since then by delivering it repeatedly.

Also, yesterday’s talk wove together threads that I’ve been building up in this blog since I first started blogging early this year. I didn’t realize this at the time, but blogging is addictive – the more I write, the more I want to write. The more ideas I share with you, The Reader, the more ideas come.

And, it took hours of blogging to develop the ideas into a decent speech in which I would have something different to say.

So here is what I’ve learned – the joy of mastery is available now, and at any moment, by developing a love relationship with our chosen work. The tangible and visible fruits, however, take time to come.

So here’s the deal: do what you love, because it beats the alternatives.

Do it better each day, because it makes things more interesting than just keeping them all the same. The hard part is keeping one’s eyes open long enough to see the longer term rewards, especially when they actually may not come. After all, there are absolutely no guarantees in life, and tomorrow October 8th, 2005 may be a reality for you, but not for me.

But being in love with one’s work, and life, may not be a bad way to spend a penultimate day.

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Holding the Company Hostage

In my work with Caribbean companies, one of the phenomena that I’ve noticed is that of “The Employee Who Can Not Be Fired.”

The Employee Who Can Not Be Fired?

Yes.

He/she deserves to be fired. Everyone knows it. Other employees may even be talking openly about it. They have developed elaborate routines to prevent themselves from being stuck working with the person. Only new, ignorant employees are assigned to work with them.

Their ineffective ways are legion, and the stuff of hallway conversation. Their failures are well-known, and well-talked about. They may never have stolen money, or attempted to defraud the company, so there is no way to call the police to let them do the dirty work (and they also can’t be idly threatened with that course of action).

In the Caribbean, there is considerable legislation that has been enacted to protect renters, and the laws make it very difficult to evict tenants, even when leases have long expired. Instead, landlords resort to all sorts of other means, some nefarious, but most involving social pressure of one kind or another to remove the unwelcome tenant-turned-squatter.

The employee I’m talking about here is basically a “cubicle/office-squatter”, and getting rid of them is extremely difficult.

One reason is that, once again, firing someone without documented cause in the Caribbean can lead to legal action, as the separation laws are written in favor of the employee. You can’t just get up one day and fire people for something like… Incompetence. In the eyes of the law, it’s just not enough.

(Whether this is a good or bad thing is beside the point of this particular blog.)

What keeps the squatter firmly in place, however, is an inability of executives and mangers to hold him/her to account on a consistent basis. Compound this inability with a deep reluctance to confront and the squatter is doubly protected. Add in a lack of adequate record-keeping by managers and human resource professionals, and you have an employee who will retire from the company with a pension. Only then will fellow employees breathe a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, among those who are breathing a sigh of relief are several others who are in the same boat but don’t know it.

The consequences of this situation in most Caribbean companies are many: an increase in costs for companies, and a decrease in morale by employees.

Our companies are terribly inefficient when compared with the best-in-class, mostly to be found in first world countries. With the exception of our tourist product in some countries, customer care and customer service are abysmal (unless you know someone on the inside). More bodies are needed to do anything and everything — I once witnessed my friend move her small townhouse in Kingston using 9 men, when I know that a similar move in the US would take 2 or 3 at most.

Yet, the Caribbean worker living in North America is among the hardest working and most productive. How does this miraculous transformation occur? Is there some white magic that comes with a green card to “farin”? Or is that magic really based in fear?

Another downside of not firing the corporate squatter is that the excellent employees who are striving to maintain increasingly better standards start to ask themselves “A whey mi a kill miself fah?” (Why am I killing myself?) It appears to them that mediocre efforts are judged in the same way that strong efforts are judged, and the financial rewards, increased authority and better teams that are expected by the high performers do not come because the squatters are taking up valuable resources, space and time.

What does it take to create a new culture? Briefly, managers must be willing to make strong, clear interventions that shake up the status quo, and alter their programs and systems to reward those who take risks.

Also, oftentimes there is a dire need for training managers in the art and science of having effective feedback and coaching conversations. The paternal and autocratic style of management learned during slavery and indentureship is of no use here, but managers have seen precious few alternatives to either alternative that work.

The opportunity for executives and managers to improve how they deal with “The Employee Who Can Not be Fired” are tremendous. At the very least, managers need to take responsibility for the fact that the phrase “Can Not” really means “Will Not,” and that their inaction keeps the situation stuck in place.

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Internal Branding

I’ve had the fortune of working with some very bright people, one of whom happens to be an expert in both HR and marketing. He introduced me to the idea of an internal brand, which is quite different from what is called an external brand.

To illustrate, imagine that you are a marketing executive of a company that manufactures and sells track-shoes, like Puma. This is a good example for me as I’ve fallen in love with the Puma brand, buying my first pair in maybe 30 years. My blue Pumas with the yellow stripe have become my favorite shoes, and to think I only bought them because the store did not have any available in Jamaican colours!

Incidentally, my wife also bought a pair, in green and black felt.

Why the sudden interest? I was travelling in Austria late last year and walked by a window of a shop with all these different color Puma track-shoes. They were beautiful to the eye, with wonderful colors and a great shape, molded to the foot. They looked very different from the heavy-sole, white running shoes I had become accustomed to wearing as a runner — in fact, it was obvious to me that these shoes were not designed for actual training, but instead were made for fashion.

From that moment, I wanted a pair.

As an outsider to the Puma company, it’s clear to me that at some point someone had the bright idea to invent a new brand of wearable track-shoe that would be every different from anything that already existed on the market. But the problem that that person faced was the following; in order to truly create a new external brand, the company needed a company culture, or internal brand, to support it.

I could imagine a moment when the strategists for Puma gathered around the drawing board excited by the idea of this new brand, until someone said “But how the heck are we going to get the designers we want in the company who think like this? How will we get the permission to hire them? How will we get the factories to change what they’ve been doing so that they can make these kinds of shoes? How will customer service be changed to give the customer this kind of feel for our products? How will our salespeople be trained to sell a very different kind of shoe to a very different kind of shop??

“In other words, how can we build an internal brand to support the external brand that we want?”

Obviously, internal brands are critical to the success of any company. Customers quickly realize the truth when reality does not match the advertising. I remember visiting a “theme park” as a boy on the state line between (if memory serves me correctly) North and South Carolina. The billboards along the way were frequent and enticing (if you’ve ever driven in Central Florida and seen the Ron Jon advertisements you’ll know what I mean).

By the time we all got there, both parents and children were salivating at the bounty of fun, excitement and thrills to be enjoyed at “South of the Border.”

When we got there we called it “a dump.”

We were so disappointed at what turned out to be little more than a truck-stop, with a ride or two and some half-dead Mexican food. We drove back bitterly complaining.

Often overlooked, however, is the impact that a lack of internal brand work has on employees.

A former client of our firm, an airline, once launched a program promising that their customer service lines would require a wait of 15 minutes or less. While sometimes it’s not a bad idea to set a stretch goal, it’s often not a good idea to launch initiatives like these without informing those who will be most impact i.e. the customer service agents.

They literally woke up one morning to discover (via advertisements in the press) that their customers were now expecting to wait less than 15 minutes to be served, which the employees knew to be impossible.

The predictable result was a drop in morale, trust and confidence.

And of course, the customers did not receive the promised shorter waiting times.

While marketing professionals are not trained to develop internal brands, neither are HR professionals, although the latter might be best equipped to lead their development.

One of the most interesting sites on the matter of internal brands is the Audacity Group: http://www.audacity.co.nz/what.asp

Francis

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Living the dream life — blogging from the beach

Yes, it’s true — I’m writing this blog from Jamaica. And last week I updated it from Trinidad, and then from Barbados.

To anyone in North America and Europe who is celebrating the arrival of 50 degree weather, I am living some kind of dream, and MUST be loving it.

Well, I am loving it…! I have to tell you that triathlon training takes on a different spin, when I’m cycling down to Port Royal with the sea on both sides, and the John Crow mountains in the background, or running on the Savannah and having a cold coconut water to refresh myself afterwards, or swimming at 5:30 am in the clear, blue waters of Rockleigh.

Hey, I’ve worked in London, Austria and Toledo, Ohio in the dead of winter. There’s a reason it’s called “dead!”

At the same time, giving up an apartment in Florida and having one here in Jamaica (i.e. really moving back) has its challenges that I won’t go into in a broad way, but I’d like to share in some of the small ways.

— yesterday I went to the plazas in Liguanea and was pleasantly surprised by the very friendly customer help I received. I mean, it was GOOD. Kudos to Western Sports for having more Pumas than any shop I’ve seen in the US, including my blue and yellow track shoes. Now, how did they figure out how to price them at about 60% of the price I paid online??????

— at the same time, I went into Sugar and Spice/Tastee Pattee shop where the staff manifested that “I don’t give a rat’s ass that you’re a customer” attitude…” that I’ve seen at the worst stores in every country I’ve been to (Brazil not included — they seemed to be universally friendly there).

There will be more on this topic to share as time goes on, and what I’d love to do is explode some of the myths about moving back to Jamaica, and the differences regarding doing business in Jamaica and North America.