Customer Service

Cus·tom·er serv·ice 
noun
-The assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services.

     This is a topic on which we’ve wanted to write about for a while. We are going to make our best effort to articulate our experiences into words; however, we know that you will NEVER understand completely unless you spend some time in our shoes. 

     In America, you’ve heard it said that “the customer is always right”. Companies know that good customer service is a critical aspect of a successful business.  Developing a reputation for honest and dependable service keeps customers coming back. Excellent customer service entails professionalism, competence, promptness (providing a timely response to the customers’ needs), trustworthiness, politeness, tenacity (good work ethic and a willingness to go above and beyond), etc..

     Of course…there will always be exceptions. Most notably, we all hate those dreaded customer service phone lines that begin with a useless and frustrating automated messaging system. After pushing buttons for 30 minutes, the computer on the other end finally realizes its inadequacy in answering your complicated question and patches you through to an operator. Then, you have to wait for 45 additional minutes  (while listening to unpleasant background music coupled with the occasional interruption of “your call is important to us, please stay on the line”) before you actually get to talk to a real person - who may or may not speak fluent English. Additionally, there is always the occasional employee who lacks the ability to interact appropriately with customers when they are having a bad day. They come across as rude when you approach them with a question or concern. Exceptions like these aside, most American companies know how to execute good customer service. Services such as “hassle-free returns” and “price matching” are just a few examples of things that American companies execute well in an effort to ensure consumer happiness.

     In Morocco…customer service does not seem to exist at all. Perhaps customer service is not important because the acquisition of a job here automatically insinuates job security. Since it’s practically impossible to lose your job, there’s no motivation to do any job well.  Or…perhaps there is some other logical reason to explain why customer service has no real significance here. If the latter is true, we have no idea what that reason may be. In our four+ years of living here, we could recount hundreds of poor customer service examples for you... but for the sake of keeping this 'already-way-too-long' blog post more concise, we are going to limit ourselves to elaborating on just one example that has frustrated us most recently:

The Internet
     Oh dear…where do we even begin with this one? The day before we flew back to America this summer (literally), a water truck came driving up our driving up our driveway and decided that our internet cable was too low...so they cut it. When we called the water company to complain, they said it was most certainly not their fault that our internet cable was lying across the ground, and that we would have to call the internet company to get the line reconnected. We left this problem in the hands of our landlord and left for America. It took them several weeks of incessant calling before a technician came and reconnected the line. When we returned to Morocco, the internet worked for about a week before it was gone again. 
     Initially, we considered the possibility that the internet was turned off due to lack of payment. We have never received (and never will recieve) an actual bill for our internet. It is the expectation of the company that you proactively go to the main office and ask how much you owe. If you don't, they will terminate their services immediately. In order to minimize the hassle of driving into the city and dealing with the completely unpredictable office hours of the payment office, we always pay several months at a time in advance. This works great so long as we maintain a record of our receipts because the main office (like every office in Morocco) is paper-based; therefore, the employees are unable to look back and tell us which months we have paid for and when we need to pay next. As it turned out, we did not have a payment issue...but we paid for four more months, just in case.
    If you run into a technical problem, there are two options presented to customers for getting their internet fixed. The first is to use a company operated landline to call #115 (a technician call center number, essentially). The second option is to go to one of the company offices and file a claim, which then gets e-mailed to the technicians. 
     Problem: we don't have a company operated landline. Our phone cable connects directly to a wireless internet router because we didn't want to be bothered by useless, Arabic telemarketer calls on a landline. Consequently, our only option was to go to the company office. 
     Fast forward:

• We went to the company office a total of 10 times, where 7 claims were "urgently" filed. Each visit coincided with an empty promise that a technician would come in the next few days. 
• We were given a secondary customer service number to call since we couldn't dial #115. We called this number incessantly for a week...but whenever we called it the automated messaging system would disconnect the call. 
• We considered threatening to leave the company and get our internet with someone else... but there is only ONE company in our area that offers DSL internet. Literally, they can have the worst customer service ever (which they do) and never lose a single customer since there's nowhere else to go!
• A friend of ours recently, and very randomly, became acquainted with a cafe waiter who fixes and reconfigures wireless routers for free. Nicole drove to the cafe in order to meet this man and let him work on our router. The waiter assessed that there was nothing wrong with it.
• The waiter, who was extremely sympathetic, called over a colleague in the cafe who works as a part-time electrician. This sweaty electrician immediately left work, jumped into his car, and followed Nicole to our house in order to search for the problem. He confirmed that the problem was within the outside cable. A company technician was necessary.
• Nicole reached out to a group of English-speaking women living in Morocco for advice. We were advised to drive down to the primary corporate office in Rabat, ignore all warnings that the manager was unavailable, push our way forcefully into the managers office, and throw everything off his desk. 
• A friend of ours gave us a personal cell number belonging to an internet technician. We called the technician 5 times...but he insisted that he was on vacation and refused to come help us (even for extra money). 
• Nicole pulled over next to a company vehicle that she saw while driving around Dar Boazza and begged the technician to follow her home and fix our internet. He got angry, told her to call #115, and drove away. 

     Three weeks went by. 
     Finally, Dave got a friend from work to call the company office in order to speak to them about our problem in Arabic. They remarked that our name was familiar because we had been to the office so many to file claims. Duh. Our friend asked why they hadn't come yet...and they responded by sending a technician over within two hours! The internet technician arrived and assessed that it was not a problem that he could fix because the issue was within the phone cable, not the internet router. Duh. He said he would e-mail a phone technician and they would come later. Our Moroccan friend insisted that this was not ok. He demanded the direct line for the phone technician and ensured that they came that day, which they did. While the technician was fixing the line, Nicole asked for his personal number - in case we ever run into this problem again. His response: "Use the company operated landline [which I see you don't have] to call #110 instead of #115".
     Please explain: Even if we DID have a phone...if the phone cable is broken, how is it even possible to use the line to call ANY technician service number?! And what's the point in filing claims at the main office if they are not going to do anything about them?!

Truly, it’s no exaggeration when we say that this list could go on forever:

• the waiters who simply neglect to transmit your order to the chef and leave you waiting for your food for an hour
• the bank tellers who say, “we have no money today…come back later”
• the postal workers who send your package back to America saying that “we refused to claim it” when they know full and well they were simply too lazy to inform us that the package even existed in the first place
• the 'customer service' desk employees who tell you that you can't return the fan that you bought because the box has been opened, even though it wasn't your fault that it turned out to be completely broken when you brought it home
• the carpet cleaners who make a giant burn spot on your brand new carpet with a cigarette (we didn't even bother to fight this battle because we know that we would never get them to give us our money back or buy us a new carpet)
• the doctors who book five different appointments simultaneously because they don’t think it’s a big deal to have you in their waiting room for two hours
• the parking attendants who demand your money even though they all they do is sit back and laugh at your inability to parallel park
• the grocery cashiers who say, "the bar code isn't working... so you can't buy that" (Didn't you read our post about shopping in Marjane?)
• the electric company that literally “makes up” a number to put on your bill each month because checking the meter for an accurate number would necessitate actually fixing the meter first…and that’s way too much work
• the taxi drivers who simply refuse to drive you in any direction that they feel is inconvenient
• the nail salon employees who make you pay for their service of mutilating your foot
• the passport control guys who decide not to show up for work on time and, therefore, almost make you miss the ferry
• the airport security guards who forcefully shove you out of the way in order to "help" you carry your  stroller down 3 flights of stairs to the airplane shuttle bus because there's no elevator (extremely unsafely & with the baby inside)... and then, when they reach the bottom, they push you into a corner and ask for money
• etc. etc. etc.

    The sad truth is that language barrier had NO influence on any of these examples. We both speak enough French and Arabic to communicate quite well in this country. It’s not a language issue at all…it’s a customer service issue. A cultural difference. We have found each year that we need to continuously lower our expectations. When we expect very little, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised when something happens that is “out of the ordinary”... like when the security guard walking through the parking lot saw Dave checking the oil in our car and came over to make sure that we were ok. We are so grateful for these little moments and we wish they came more frequently. But....

TIA (This is Africa): Lower your expectations. Choose your battles.

-Dave, Nicole, & Aliyah