National service excellence strategy: flawed by design?
12. Nov, 2008
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Cape Town – Success for DEAT’s national service excellence strategy requires delivery from TBCSA. But they may not be able to deliver. As was mentioned last week, DEAT is in no position to deliver service excellence in the tourism industry on its own.
The good news is that the draft strategy recognises this reality. DEAT have turned to the Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA) to bring the private sector to the table, considering them co-champions of the SA Service Quality Initiative (SASQI), which will be the institutional home for implementation of the strategy.
TBCSA, from DEAT’s perspective, is a credible, single entity through which the private sector can be engaged: work with TBCSA, you work with the private sector. The reality, however, is that TBCSA doesn’t represent the lion’s share of the industry, and the layers of constituent organisations between TBCSA and private sector businesses they do represent mean that any implementation will be slow, indirect and subject to local agendas. Yes, TBCSA can get the big players to the table, but tourism is predominantly an SMME industry and the challenge of improving service excellence lies mainly at that end of the spectrum.
If, for example, I owned a restaurant in Durban, they’d have to try to reach me through a constituent sectoral association, which in the case of a restaurant would likely be RASA at a national level and then via my local RASA office – which it turns out doesn’t exist in Durban (or anywhere except Johannesburg and Cape Town). Of course, with RASA’s members dominated by chain and franchise restaurants (Ocean Basket, Mugg & Bean, etc.), it’s statistically unlikely that I’d be a RASA member anyway.
Then, even if I do happen to be in the broad TBCSA network, they still have to persuade me that service excellence is a problem, and persuade me that it’s a priority problem for my business, and persuade me to spend time and money to deal with it. (And for those who think that marketing campaigns can bypass the linkages and go straight to the business owner, you’re going to need a marketing budget of millions per annum, maybe tens of millions to break through the media clutter and motivate behavioural change among over-burdened entrepreneurs. Good luck.) Once I am persuaded, the technical interventions listed in the strategy, like THETA-accredited training, would need to be delivered. Only then, if all the linkages held and if all the persuasion worked and if the training was good and if my employees actually changed their behaviour does anything happen in terms of delivering on the strategy itself. Everything else in between is just legwork. Lots of it.
The institutional framework in the strategy anticipates this very problem, and so creates a National Service Excellence Forum (NASEF) – “a collaborative body of stakeholder representatives” designed to pull in the various industry associations like RASA and the dozen or so others. I’m not optimistic that it will address the problem, given that a.) it’s another bloody structure (a forum of associations, no less) and duplicates the role TBCSA is meant to play in the first place, and b.) it lumps together tourism, retail, financial services, transport, Home Affairs, the Police, Customs, Foreign Affairs and – for good measure – local governments. Yikes.
To be clear, the shortcomings I’m raising are not those of TBCSA (or RASA). They are inherent in the way that national government typically engages with the private sector. You can get the big mines together, or the big banks, and make things happen. But this approach doesn’t work for the diverse, geographically scattered, SMME-dominated tourism sector. As a result, trying to produce the desired behavioural change in the industry will be inefficient, slow and costly.
What’s worse, where behavioural change does happen, it will be first in the big established hotel, restaurant and tour operators reachable via TBCSA who already dominate the industry channels, giving them a further leg up over the emerging entrepreneurs and authentic, local community and cultural tourism products, maybe even raising the barrier to transformation in the industry. Talk about unintended consequences!
So DEAT, needing private sector partners to achieve its goals, has to overcome major risks inherent in its strategy if those partnerships are going to deliver. What do you think? Is DEAT in trouble with this one? Does TBCSA have a way to deliver that I’ve overlooked? Have I lost the plot? What’s the answer?
Add your voice to the discussion – comment below.
About Blogger
KURT ACKERMANN writes, researches and consults on strategy, business models and brands for organisations adapting to globalisation and technological change. He is the proprietor of the Afrikatourism blog for responsible travel at afrikatourism.blogspot.com.
My name is Muzi Mohale a full-time travel blogger, your host at Travelwires.com responsible for all editorial on this blog. I blog about the travel and tourism industry in Africa. Apart from blogging about tourism, I also run 
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