Inselaffen

Customer service excellence in UAE ‘better than many countries, particularly European’ | The National

mentalist

Article written by the president of the Dubai-based International Customer Service Institute, so hardly unexpected or he would lose his job.

Boomhauer

The MiddleEast does not know what Customer service is. When I lived there, many a time it seemed like me the buyer was doing the seller a favour ; that's how the seller made it seem. Refunds for defective stuff was out of the question.

The smaller/independent shops are set up such that if you want to look at a product, you have to get the shop keeper to hand the stuff over to you, which is a chore because you want to be able to read the product descriptions of many items and pestering the shop keeper time and again is not doable.

Bahtatboy

My go-to bar here (one of only three in a town of some 300,000 people) won't exchange a bottle of wine if it's off. C'est la vie.

Meow

There are consumer laws that, from memory, have been in place since 2006 although stores have largely only complied in the past few years. I've had items replaced since 2007 by a) pointing out that there is a law and they have to follow it and b) being bloody minded and insistent when required. It didn't help that staff were not aware and were just following orders.

That said customer service has a long way to go but I can't wholly blame staff as many are poorly trained and treated and paid badly. I would do the bare minimum if I was paid as little as most customer facing employees.

scot47

aaargh ! Wrong thread. Caffeine deficiency strikes again.

Boomhauer

I was last there in the mid 90s so things have changed for the better I see.

Agree that it isn't really the employees fault as they are poorly paid and treated.

Bahtatboy

Having just posted a message on another thread regarding ME/Maghreb countries, I'm actually struggling to think of a Muslim country which has well paid and properly-treated employees.

scrubbedexpat141

The main thing being that the Customer Service element of this region is done by....people not from this region.

It's like saying the previous inhabitants of the moon are wankers. When really they're just American.