Of failing standards in our service sector

In simple terms, service providers (educators, law enforcers, health care providers, restaurants, retailers, etc.) ought to act as facilitators. By this simple act, they can facilitate the lives of others, thus setting up a chain of service provisions and consumptions. When this system is well orchestrated, people develop a set of stable expectations around which they can organise their lives and make it as productive as possible, and are thus enabled to contribute to the national wealth pool.

Introduce a weak link in this system and the expectations become unstable, disrupting normal productive routines. Introduce several weak links in the system and we have the potential for chaos. Valuable national hours are lost as people try to bring order to their lives when broken expectations become a devastatingly disorienting force.

Chaos, unfortunately, is routine in the lives of the people of Bangladesh. In the service sector, somehow, life's basic expectations and ability to predict have been maimed and this is costing the nation … royally! Witness, for example, how droves of people having lost faith in predictability are seeking health care, higher education, or even vacations and other services abroad. This failure of the service sector to facilitate the lives of others is so abysmal, the apathy so palpable, it is no wonder this nation of immense possibilities continues to languish in despair and hopelessness.

Who is failing us? What is the extent of this failure? Is there a way out?

The country's political leadership is always an easy scapegoat, although one cannot deny that the past and continuing failures of leadership translate to failures on a wider scale as reflected across the economic, social, and spiritual landscape. But there's much more to it. Here, I do not engage in armchair discourse or ivory tower theorising to examine the questions. Instead, I rely on data -- real data from real people. I asked people about their daily lives and the role that various service providers, both public and private, have played as facilitators. The findings are not unexpected: both sectors have failed them miserably, barring, perhaps, some freak anomalies. The private sector's provision of low grade and deplorable services rivals those of the public sector -- as the data will show -- and efficiency gains may have been marginal at best, while the plight of the consumer has been one of sustained suffering. The bottom line is that the service sector -- like its manufacturing counterpart -- is costing the nation untold woes that translate into financial, psychological, and social costs. What is distressing is that instead of being in the business of service, both sectors seem to be championing the business of disservice, exploiting and impoverishing the hapless consumer, anytime anywhere. I call this the leech syndrome! The saddest part is that the maltreated and thoroughly abused citizen has no one to turn to for redress. Here are some statistics to support my exhortations: you, the readers, be the judge.

We employed students of a private university to survey people from their own middle class backgrounds about recent service experiences. Of the 346 people interviewed, 320 or 92.5 per cent indicated having recently encountered a highly dissatisfying service. This is staggering -- a staggering failure of our service providers! Of these low grade service experiences, 126 (39.4 per cent) were delivered by the public sector, while 172 (54 per cent) were delivered by the private sector. Note the percentage of dissatisfying services delivered by the private sector.

We probed further to investigate what went wrong and found that the "human factor" was responsible for 72 per cent of the dissatisfactions. Human failures include callousness, carelessness, incompetence, lack of empathy, lack of responsiveness, poor reliability, shameless greed, laziness, and plain bad manners. "Technological failures" were noted by 11 per cent of the dissatisfied respondents, while "process failures" (having to wait longer than necessary, too many signatures, etc.) accounted for another 10 per cent.

And who were the offenders? The telecommunications industry (both public and private) was by far the worst offender, registering 25 per cent of the dissatisfaction votes, followed by the transportation sector, the banking sector, electric supply, retail food sector, and Internet service providers. Hospital and health services, water sector, and "other" retail services were also among the prominent offenders. Interestingly, with all the furor over education, it didn't show up as a big offender. Perhaps people are so overwhelmed by the daily irritants that they have little time to contemplate the failures of this ubiquitous industry and its long-term adverse impact; or perhaps, people do not see education as a service yet!

When asked about redress or solutions, a large proportion of the sufferers felt they had nowhere to turn. Many of them felt strongly that there was no use complaining, another sizeable proportion didn't even know where to complain, while a significant number felt it was not worth their time to seek redress, choosing to suffer their inconveniences and rage silently because they felt they would be given the run around by an acerbic kalkey ashen (come tomorrow). When it comes to service, this is what we have turned into -- a "kalkey ashen" society that is conducive to various forms of manipulation: forget for the moment the height of inconvenience and quandary this little phrase generates! And among those who tried to complain, a whopping 74 per cent indicated that their complaints were never resolved.

So, there you have it: a succinct view of this nation's so called service providers. Interestingly, for this study, we gained insights from the middle class. One can only imagine the plight of the marginalised -- the rickshaw puller, the garment worker, the street peddler, and so on.

Is there a way out? Unfortunately, the malady goes down deep. The character and conscience of our service providers are gravely afflicted. Widespread selfishness, uncaring authority, depraved values, unbridled greed, a senseless rush to acquire and "show" ones wealth and a host of similar human failures are behind what ails this nation and mars its chances of emerging from the morass. Unless these deep-seated traits change, uncertainty and unpredictability, that are easy to manipulate for personal gain, will be a substantial part of our service experiences. The cost of adjusting to these uncertainties can be exorbitant, making emancipation elusive. It's not the public or private sector that we really ought to worry about, it's ourselves -- our character and conscience as service providers -- that we need to fix.

Dr. Syed Saad Andaleeb is Professor and Program Chair of Marketing at the Sam and Irene Black School of Business, Pennsylvania State University at Erie, and Editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. This article is dedicated to those students of East West University, Bangladesh, who enthusiastically helped gather the data.