By Professor C. Justin Robinson

Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal,

The UWI Five Islands Campus

My colleague Dr Anne Crick of The University of the West Indies Mona says that in the Caribbean you get three types of service. “The tourist service,” “the friend service” and “the rest of them service.” Every Caribbean reader knows which one is good and Rhaj, Keisha and Lasonta know which one they received last week.

Let’s start with the everyday queues in the Endurance Economy. Forty people, Dr. Crick’s “the rest of them” wait four hours a day in the passport application line. Their wait represents 160 hours of unproductive time consumed before lunch. The costs of the Endurance Economy are often unequal. The employee has to get time off and may lose sick days or vacation days. A vendor loses sales, a person travelling from a rural district loses earnings and transport costs, while someone sent home twice for a missing document may abandon the application and miss out on an important service. Meanwhile, the well-connected person gets “the friend service” and bypasses the line. Everyone looks on and sees a daily demonstration of the value of knowing somebody.

The Endurance Economy is at work even in the courts and the consequences can be devastating. Think of a small contractor who is owed a sum large enough to threaten the business, but she knows the matter will take years if it goes to court and she can’t afford the legal fees. The debt is ignored and she stops extending credit to unfamiliar customers or without security. In the Endurance Economy contracts cannot be enforced in reasonable time and relationships substitute for law. Firms remain small and commerce more personal than it needs to be. This is the Endurance Economy at work.

Albert Hirschman gave us a useful way to understand the “tourist service.” When an organization’s service is sub-standard, the customer or citizen has two main responses, exit, the ability to leave, and voice, which is the ability to complain to someone who must respond. Tourists usually have both!

In the Endurance Economy, Dr. Crick’s “tourist service” arises because a dissatisfied visitor can exit by choosing another hotel or island next year. The visitor has voice through reviews on Tripadvisor that can affect bookings and reach the manager whose performance depends on reputation. The visitors’ combination of exit and voice demands good service.

The “friend service” arises from something else that is especially valued in small societies, a relationship. A nurse instantly recognizes the family name of her old Headmistress, while a cousin knows the officer manning the desk. A few WhatsApp messages are exchanged and you are sorted without the lines. In the Endurance Economy relationships become part of the infrastructure through which ordinary entitlements are delivered and a right is quietly converted into a favour. The person who knows nobody, “the rest of them” has to line up and endure. Everybody learns that rules are negotiable and to find patrons rather than hold institutions accountable, which is the oil that keeps the Endurance Economy running.

The “rest of them service” is offered to most of us who, often don’t have a relationship, meaningful exit nor binding voice. There may be one electricity provider, one water authority and one passport office which means a complaint may terminate in the department that caused it.

The existence of these three types of service across the Caribbean makes a mockery of our favourite explanation that poor service is a cultural phenomenon and the notion that “Caribbean people are just that way.” If the problem were simply culture why would tourists, friends and important people get excellent service while “the rest of them” get service that depends on “what side of the bed staff woke up on that day.” The people do not change when they enter the hotel or call centre gates what changes is the customer’s capacity for exit and the presence of customer voice.

Adequate competition is often presented as the solution to poor levels of customer service, and I agree that competition is what gives the customer the capacity to exit a particular service provider. It is challenging to provide exit across a range of services in the Caribbean. Many public services cannot be duplicated, and our small scale will not support many providers in a number of private industries, so while competition matters it will not be the entire answer to poor service in our region. Because exit is impossible or limited in many areas in the Caribbean, voice must be strengthened until it performs the discipline competition would otherwise provide.

Service charters are another common solution to improve customer service. Many organizations across the Caribbean have service charters, often prominently displayed to the public and studiously ignored by staff of the same organizations. A service charter may promise courtesy and timeliness but if there are no consequences when the promise is broken the charter has the same status as a piece of abstract art on the wall.

My proposal is a Citizen Service Warranty starting with a pilot on a small set of administrative services. The pilot should include services that require fees and whose start and finish can be objectively recorded. Examples could be passport renewals, driver’s licences, company certificates, planning decisions or police records. The refund is voice with teeth, a complaint the agency must pay for

For each service, the agency would publish a realistic standard of service and if the standard is breached for reasons within its control, the customer would receive an automatic partial refund, fee credit or waiver on the next transaction.

Anne Crick’s three kinds of service are not three kinds of Caribbean people. They are three distributions of power, the tourist can leave, the friend can call, the others can do neither. The citizen should not need either exit or a relationship to receive what is already theirs. In the final part we explore a major cost of the Endurance Economy, paying twice.

This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: The Endurance Economy: A Three-Part Series.