“Why do customers complain, why citizens don’t?”

CUSTOMERS AND CITIZENS, CALL CENTERS AND GOVERNMENT

The call center phenomenon in the Philippines is a welcome development primarily because of its economic contribution. Call centers have improved employment conditions in the country and of course, the domino effect takes its natural course…

I think that call centers may have its beneficial effects on governance as well. It transforms each citizen to become customers. Don’t you wonder, “why customers complain and citizens don’t”?

The problem is that citizens don’t internalize their being customers or clients of this government. For crying out loud, we are tax-paying citizens and we have every right to exact proper service from this government.

Call centers may be changing the Filipino psyche. They slowly teach us how to complain. If only we can internalize this role and play this up with government shortcomings. We should complain. This is yet the first step.

The next step and perhaps more challenging is for government to be as responsive as the call centers. Unlike government, call centers have a quality assurance system in place to ensure that customers get their answers quick. Why? What gives? Well, because the company outsourcing the call center service will and might just lose the customers. This is not the same for government. The paying citizens cannot just pull-out their citizenship from this country. It takes more than the issue of getting complaints acted upon to finally disown this country.

But if I were to be asked, as customers, we can just refuse to pay our taxes. Maybe then government will give a damn.

I wish we, Filipinos, could be transformed into customers by this ‘call center’ phenomenon. Let us give a damn about the tax payments we make and complain for low return of investment.