Was it good for you, Dear?...

A few days ago I had an unusual experience. What was it? I received quality customer service!

How sad it is that this has become an unusual occurrence and something to ‘write home about’. Not only was the service excellent, but the company I was dealing with bothered to send an email survey afterwards asking me to rate the service – now that nearly knocked me off my cynical chair! Was this all a cruel dream? No – but it could have been. When I experience great service from an organisation or company, I normally write to them saying so (its better than groaning on about bad service all the time), but this bunch got to me even before I could do that! Wow!

So why am a talking about this on NGOPulse? Well, how often do we in the NGO sector bother to ask the people we work with or provide services to what they think of our service? Okay, we do tend to count how many people we attended to, helped or worked with (and worse still – yes, worse – how many ‘we empowered’. What happened to us creating empowering contexts and allowing people to ‘empower themselves’ – does ‘we empowered’ not imply we dis-empowered by doing it ourselves? But enough of that for today, I digress, more another day). We sprout forth - “26 zillion people have a better life because we did x, y and z” – that kind of stuff. But do we actually ask about the way we worked together? Do we ask how we could do it better? Do our monitoring and evaluation systems (hmmm, what are those some may ask?) check out ‘satisfaction’ or do we simply look at ‘impact’ (whatever that is and for whomever)? Maybe we should start asking the ‘was it good for you too dear?…’ type questions. We may not always like the answers, but if we ask the questions about the quality of our work and levels of satisfaction with how we interact and not only the ‘results/outcomes/outputs’ we may learn a little more and do a little better - provided, of course, we commit to acting on the information we get.

With increasing competition for resources, perhaps NGOs will eventually be judged by the communities they work with not only by what they do ‘for and with’ the communities but also by HOW they do it – the quality issue. This would be good. So, go-on, think about it next time you interact with the people you work with. Don’t be shy, ask the question – ‘how good was it for you this time….?’ Then write home about it!