Public servants who give citizens a “hard time” to be disciplined- Ally

…as mandatory customer service training to be introduced

Public Service, Government Efficiency and Implementation Minister, Zulfikar Ally, has announced that mandatory customer service training for public servants will be introduced, warning that those who give citizens “a hard time” will be disciplined. He made the announcement last week during the commissioning of a Government Service Centre in Bartica, Region Seven (Cuyuni-Mazaruni). “It doesn’t matter what type of service we are providing, once it is a public service, our expectation, President Ali’s expectation is that you serve it with love, you serve it with compassion and you ensure that whoever is in front of you, that they get the benefits of what they came for,” the Minister emphasised. “For the very few throughout the system who knows nothing better but to give our citizens a hard time, to give our brothers and sisters a hard time, that if they had a hard time at home in the morning, they’re gonna come here and take it out on everyone, that is going to be a thing of the past because if it happens now, we are going to institute disciplinary measures and if you have to be removed from interfacing with the public, we will have to do so, we’ll put you at the backend. And we are going to put the judgement of that in the hands of the people of Guyana,” he further explained.
According to Minister Ally, every public facility will soon be equipped with a QR code which citizens can utilise to rate the service they received.

“It will take them one minute to scan that code and to put in their name, their number, the date, what happened and who was the officer involved and it will come and it will be sent to the agency and if you think you are a bad officer, and you getting 5-10 complaints from citizens, it can’t be ten people out to get you, it means you’re not doing something right,” the public service Minister asserted. In this regard, he announced that customer service training will soon be rolled out for all public servants, especially those who interface with the public. The Minister emphasised that the objective is to transform the culture of public service delivery and ensure citizens leave Government offices satisfied with the assistance they receive.
Meanwhile, the Minister has informed the Department of Public Information (DPI) that to date, more than 3,480 public servants have been trained over the past year in various areas, including professionalism and ethics, information and communications technology (ICT) literacy, project management, digital transformation and customer service. The expansion of customer service training comes alongside Government’s wider efforts to modernise public service delivery, including the establishment of service centres in the regions and the digitisation of Government services. He stressed that modern infrastructure and digital systems would have limited impact if citizens are not treated with the respect and dignity they deserve when interacting with public servants.