MA Khine Zar, a 23-year-old university student, has become accustomed to dealing with stern-faced salespeople who tell her things like “If you buy it, you can try it” while she shops, but such attitudes still annoy her.

“If I’m shopping for shoes and an impatient salesperson won’t let me try them on, I won’t buy them even if I really need them,” she says, adding that employees in many retail stores underestimate the value of providing good customer service in a competitive market.

“There are plenty of stores where I can go to shop, so if one fails to give me satisfaction as a customer, I’ll never go there again,” Ma Khine Zar says.
Other shoppers are annoyed by what they perceive as overzealousness on the part of salespeople.

“I don’t like it when I go into a store and a salesperson follows me closely everywhere I go,” says another frequent shopper, Ko Win Ko. “I feel embarrassed by it, and it makes me wonder whether they think I’m a shoplifter.”

Business management student Ma Thein Thein Oo says that when people go shopping, they expect staff to be warm, hospitable and patient, but all too frequently the experience fails to live up to these standards.

“I have even had to complain to the manager of a well-known supermarket because the service was so poor,” Ma Thein Thein Oo says. “I asked a salesgirl some questions and she behaved as if she was too busy to answer me.”

“More shop owners need to teach their staff about the importance of maintaining good relations between customers and salespeople,” she says.

Suzanne Pun, a senior training consultant at Stamford-City Business Institute in downtown Yangon, says that businesses whose staff realise the importance of keeping their customers satified tend to do better than those that do not..
“Some companies even require their staff to attend customer service training courses,” she says, adding that Myanmar has fallen behind many other developing countries in this regard.

“Too many shop owners don’t think it’s necessary to provide such training because they don’t understand that customers are the foundation of their business, and that providing good service is the easiest way to gain an advantage over their rivals,” she says.

“Even something as simple as giving information to customers over the telephone can go a long way,” she says. “Providing information is the first step in attracting customers to the store and selling your products to them.”

The front office manager of the Grand Plaza Parkroyal Hotel, Ko Thet Naing Win, says he makes sure his staff respects the complaints of hotel guests.

“We deal with large numbers of guests everyday, and we’re always ready to handle their complaints,” he says. “I tell my staff that it’s not up to them to try to prove who is right or wrong when a customer complains. Their job is simply to find out what the guests need and why they are not satisfied.”

He says dissatisfied customers can be divided into two types: those who complain and those who do not.

“I would rather have a dissatisfied guest make a complaint so we can fix the problem and make them happy so they will come back,” he says. “In my 12 years of hotel experience, I have found that those who are not satisfied and don’t say anything respond by never coming back to the hotel.”

Super One Department Store is another business that puts a premium on providing good customer service, says senior staff member Ma Moe Htay.

“When someone is hired at Super One, we teach them about the importance of good customer service,” she says. “Even if there is a problem we train our staff to be patient and tolerant, and to take the attitude that the customer is always right.”

“Once someone is our customer we want to keep them as our customer,” she says.