COLTEK SENIOR STAFF SCHOOLED ON CUSTOMER SERVICE

Senior Staff at the College of Technology Education, Kumasi (COLTEK) of the University of Education Winneba (UEW) have undergone a day’s training on effective Customer Service delivery as part of the University’s efforts to ensure its rank and file is always ready to offer excellent service to clients.

The University has a vision to become an internationally reputable institution for teacher education and research and therefore never wavers in its commitment to offer training to guarantee staff offer top quality service to students and all other stakeholders. In order to achieve optimal returns from the training, the Human Resource Department (HRD) of COLTEK, not only sought the services of an acclaimed Customer Service Consultant, Dr Raphael Asamoah as resource person but deliberately designed the workshop to be practical - mixing up lectures, examples and exercises in equal measure to encourage participation.

No wonder participants were caught engrossed in every stage of the workshop and still remained committed and highly interested even when the scheduled time for closing was far elapsed. As part of his facilitation, Dr. Asamoah advocated for UEW to establish and uncompromisingly implement Customer Service Standards if the University were to maintain a respectable market share in a highly competitive education industry. He said UEW could not afford to allow employees to make up their own standards or those they carried over from their previous employment. That he stressed would only leave the university in a situation of increasing inconsistencies in service delivery since individual employees could choose the level of service they wished to offer under any circumstances.

Following an elaborate lecture he gave on Customer Service Standards (CSS) subsequently, Dr. Asamoah suggested that a UEW CSS could be made relevant to the customer, based on consultation, consistent, ambitious but realistic, transparent, communicated and continuously updated. Again he said it was important for procedures to be set out about how to access service in the University but as much as possible such procedures should not be made too cumbersome to deter potential customers.

Earlier, the Acting College Registrar, Mr. Michael Kofi Twum-Ampomah officially opened the workshop on behalf of the Principal of COLTEK, Prof. (Ing.) Reynolds Okai with a reminder to participants to keep the stiff competition UEW faced in focus so they would learn to take better care of customers in order to keep the university afloat.