Looking for service

I told myself I should use the minutes gathering my thoughts for this article; it would help me take my mind off the sardine-tight packing I was in. The crowding was nothing unusual for the HongKong MTR as it was a weekday evening, though having got on at the terminal station Sheung Wan (where my office was), I had briefly entertained the hope of getting a seat. No chance even then, and after the inward surge of Central, I should count myself lucky that my chest had room to breathe. Don't fret about it, I told myself, I was just going 2 more stations to Causeway Bay. Think about this article instead.

This piece began germinating some months previously and a thousand kilometres away, in Thailand. It started one evening in the lobby of a rather cheap hotel. I had flappered down in my sandals to try, after a fruitless complaint by telephone, to explain face to face to the receptionist that there was something wrong with either the TV set in my room, or more likely, the satellite dish. CNN had pictures, but no sound, and the news that day was rather interesting, though I can't recall now what it was about! All the other channels were fine, and so my guess was that the satellite reception was the problem. Really, it didn't matter what the cause was, I just wanted it fixed.

That young lady at the reception desk was no help at all! She gave me a look so blank, you could write on it. Still, it shouldn't be too difficult to ask her to summon the technician for me. However, she insisted on knowing why I wanted a technician -- TV problem, I said -- but then wanted to know what kind of TV problem, though I thought it was foolhardy of her to ask, since her English was certainly not up to comprehending whatever answer I was about to give. But fine, if you want to know what kind of problem, then I will tell you what kind of problem.

"You know CNN?" I began. "I have a problem with it. Have picture, no sound."

"CNN?"

"Yes, satellite television, you know, here, I draw you a picture.... Satellite dish, yes? And we get CNN channel?"

"CNN? What mean you CNN?"

"As I said, TV channel ... from the sky."

It continued like this for a few minutes, and I came to the unshakable belief that (a) she had never heard of CNN before, (b) she didn't know that the hotel where she worked offered CNN as one of its attractions, (c) she didn't know what channels were available in the hotel, and (d) she didn't even know the hotel had a satellite dish.

Finally she said, referring to the technician, "He go home, sick o'cock finit."

Don't laugh at that sick o'cock answer, please. And as for why she couldn't have told me that at the very beginning, I did not want to ask.

That incident got me thinking about writing an article on either service quality, or productivity -- more the latter, because it begged the question of how she deserved to be paid what she was paid (however little that might have been by developed country standards). Her job knowledge was pathetic and she had such poor problem-solving skills, she actually exacerbated the problem with the customer rather than mollified him.

But the idea of an article didn't really develop, mostly because I couldn't find a fresh viewpoint regarding productivity.

Then a few months after that incident, the service quality angle was briefly fired up again, this time on China Eastern Airlines. We had just reached cruising altitude, and I got up to go astern to the lavatories. There in the last rows were all the stewardesses, taking a nap. Quite a sight!

Now, on Singapore Airlines, this would be one of the cabin crew's busiest moments. They would be going up and down the aisle handing out hot towels, headsets and menus, serving drinks and peanuts, and attending to requests for blankets and extra pillows. With the latest improvements to inflight entertainment, they also had people asking how to operate the individual movie gadgets. On China Eastern Airlines however, forty winks.

Never mind, I said to myself. It's cheaper on China Eastern. There are no hot towels, no inflight entertainment, hence no headsets to pass out. There isn't even one pillow in the seat, so forget about extra pillows.

Ah, but what about drinks?

Half an hour or so later, they roused themselves, and started pushing their carts up the aisles, serving brunch. On the tray were a salad-like thing, some cold ham, scrambled eggs with olives (yes, olives in China, imagine!), butter and jam. Nothing to drink. Then another stewardess followed, and she handed out soft rolls from a huge plastic bag. I remember telling myself, I'm sure they re-use the bag. The rolls were cold too. Never mind, this is China.

But still no fluid.

Most passengers didn't seem to mind, and they ploughed into their brunch. The guy across the aisle from me obviously had a more tender palate, and he tried to get their attention to ask for some water at least. To no avail. They had marched right back to the galley and disappeared from view.

But he was a patient man and he wasn't hungry, so he just waited till they came up the aisle again with their carts. Serving drinks this time perhaps? No, collecting the trays!

"But I am still waiting for your drinks," he said.

"It's coming. The cart behind me will have drinks," she replied, with dulcet tones. "Why don't you eat first?"

"My mouth is dry. I want to wet my mouth before I eat." He sounded quite astonished that he had to explain that.

"Then you have to eat fast, because we are landing soon."

And you know what flashed though my mind then? That you can say the most infuriating things with perfect sweetness of voice.

The MTR rattled on, but my thoughts were not making much progress, and finally, I had to attend to the issue of how to wiggle my way out from the jam-packed carriage. When that was achieved, I had to look for signs indicating the most convenient exit to get to Windsor House. The Hong Kong MTR's downtown stations have typically 8 - 12 exits, spread around through a warren of tunnels. Take the wrong exit and you may have no idea where you are when you hit the street.

My colleague had told me to look for the Daimaru or Sogo exit. So I did, and found it quite easily. I briefly consulted a vicinity map on a wall, went up a few escalators and reached Great George Street. Five minutes' walk later, I found Windsor House. All in all, it was easy. And that's when it hit me.

Almost always when we speak of good service, we think of smiling staff, efficient and knowledgeable about their jobs, and able to anticipate your needs. If they can't give you exactly what you want, they can propose good alternatives, and they also know when to hold back, so that you are not overwhelmed by too much service.

What struck me as I crossed Great George Street towards Windsor House was that in our modern age, there is another form of excellent service, one that is not rendered by people attending to your needs there and then. The form that I am referring to is the meticulous planning that enables a perfectly satisfactory degree of self-service.

Take the MTR station for example. You buy tickets from the vending machines. The system is reduced to the simplest possible, and the steps are clearly indicated on the machines themselves. Press the button for your destination on the vending machine, and it will display the fare. You don't have to ask anyone. Then put in some money and it will dispense the ticket and the change. Alternatively, you can buy stored-value tickets from other machines with equal ease.

The turnstyles are all automatic, and they will tell you how much you have on your ticket when you exit. The timing is finetuned so precisely, you hardly have to break step as you walk through them.

All over, there are signs to indicate which platform serves which train direction. The exits are just as conveniently marked, with numerous signs indicating which exits lead to which streets and buildings in the vicinity. If you aren't too sure about the locality, there are maps.

Think about it for a moment. A system like HongKong's MTR or Singapore's MRT serves millions of passengers everyday. They find their own way around a system that snakes many kilometres around a city. They don't ever speak to any officer. Even tourists figure out the system all by themselves with the aid of the signs and machines.

Good airport terminals and railway stations are similarly user-friendly. Through signages, video monitors and self-service machines you can find your way around, know whether the train or plane is delayed, pay the departure tax or change money.

Efficient placement of signs and design of self-service machines do not happen by chance. Human behaviour is carefully analysed and any complexity in machine-human interaction is reduced to the absolute minimum. The signs are not randomly placed. They are carefully spaced out so that their messages do not conflict and they are put up at exactly where the eye would expect them to be. The size of the lettering, the lighting around the signs, the choice of colours, are deliberated upon quite thoroughly before installation.

Sometimes a decision is made to use an internationally recognised symbol instead of words, which would be specific to a language. But how international is international? Again, this is carefully considered beforehand. The fact that we think nothing of the ease with which we use these modern amenities merely indicates the high standard of planning that has gone into them.

But are transport hubs the only places with these characteristics? No, surely, but it took me a few days to find a contrasting alternative. Then I saw an example of poor planning in a restaurant's buffet dinner and I began to have more respect for other restaurants which do a better job of it.

The restaurant with the bad marks had a number of faults in the layout of the buffet spread. They put two large tureens of soup side by side. Everyone thought we had a choice of two different soups. Half the diners however had a shock when they took the first mouthful of it, for one of the soups was sweet. The Chinese have a long tradition of sweet soups, equivalent to desserts, except that this tureen was not placed anywhere near the dessert section.

All the sauces and condiments were grouped together on a side table. Since they were separated from the dishes, some people were quite confused which sauces went with which. In fact, after picking up a few pieces of sushi, I spent at least a minute and a half looking for the wasabe, expecting it to be adjacent to the sushi. Even after locating the wasabe on the side table, I was confounded by the 3 different types of soy sauce there, with no indication which was the Japanese one.

The buffet was not completely without signs however. There was a little card saying "smoked salmon", but there was nothing I could recognise as salmon anywhere near it. Despite going back several times, I never saw any salmon.

Lastly, they had on display a few bowls of noodles. You were supposed to point to one and ask the chef to cook a fresh one for you. The chef was more often away from his station than not, and without any sign to indicate that they were samples, every now and then some guest would take away one of the display bowls, only to discover that it had gone cold long ago. Well, at least it wasn't plastic!

So every time we enjoy the convenience of a self-service place, be it an airport, restaurant, coin laundromat or supermarket, spare a little thought for the guys who designed the layout, who anticipated your needs and questions, and supplied the answers through signs and terminals, who thought through the pattern of human thinking and placed objects in the most natural groupings; in other words, who made self-service happily possible.

© Yawning Bread 

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