Come home to Ghana, work, and bring your customer service demands with you
3 July 2013
Expatriate and diaspora Ghanaians interested in finding work in their homeland have been told their skills are not the only thing in demand in Ghana – their expectations of good customer service could also be valuable.
Wed, 3 Jul 2013Expatriate and diaspora Ghanaians interested in finding work in their homeland have been told their skills are not the only thing in demand in Ghana – their expectations of good customer service could also be valuable.
This is according to Pearl Esuah-Mensah, deputy managing director of Ghana’s UT Bank, speaking in London last Saturday (29 June) at the Ghana Careers Fair 2013, organised by the Network for Diasporan Professionals (NFDP) and attended by Recruiter.
Acknowledging that customer service on offer in Ghana is “notoriously bad”, Esuah-Mensah said: “We need to people to teach us in Ghana what customer service really means… the more of you who come home to Ghana and demand proper customer service, the better.”
The idea is that returning Ghanaians would have higher expectations of businesses’ customer service, and thus force greater standards.
However, it can be problematic if people arriving to work in Ghana do not adjust their expectations of things like regulation, bureaucracy, technology and efficiency, she continued.
“We have a lot of foreign [ie. expatriate] Ghanaians who come home and they feel that everything in Ghana is bad,” she said. When recruiting from overseas, she says, “it’s about attitude” – finding people who are “willing to understand” that things are not necessarily “bad” or “wrong”, and that they will have to accept that to some extent things are just different.
This is according to Pearl Esuah-Mensah, deputy managing director of Ghana’s UT Bank, speaking in London last Saturday (29 June) at the Ghana Careers Fair 2013, organised by the Network for Diasporan Professionals (NFDP) and attended by Recruiter.
Acknowledging that customer service on offer in Ghana is “notoriously bad”, Esuah-Mensah said: “We need to people to teach us in Ghana what customer service really means… the more of you who come home to Ghana and demand proper customer service, the better.”
The idea is that returning Ghanaians would have higher expectations of businesses’ customer service, and thus force greater standards.
However, it can be problematic if people arriving to work in Ghana do not adjust their expectations of things like regulation, bureaucracy, technology and efficiency, she continued.
“We have a lot of foreign [ie. expatriate] Ghanaians who come home and they feel that everything in Ghana is bad,” she said. When recruiting from overseas, she says, “it’s about attitude” – finding people who are “willing to understand” that things are not necessarily “bad” or “wrong”, and that they will have to accept that to some extent things are just different.
- Recruiter’s Global Spotlight series visits Ghana in the July edition of the magazine – look out in a fortnight’s time for further views from the Ghana Careers Fair and beyond…
