05.01.06 Part 4 of How Negative Gossip Almost Took My Life

My Work Life and the Service Improvement Model that Evoked a Defamatory Rumour Against Us

After graduating with a degree in agriculture and working as an agricultural officer, I joined Care Uganda, first as a receptionist then as a non-formal trainer on a Farm Forestry Project funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). It was there that I got a British Council Scholarship to acquire the Women Overseas Technical Trainers Award from the United Kingdom. Afterwards, I was sponsored by the Australian government to pursue a master’s in economics degree at the University of New England in Australia. Thereafter, I worked as a Training Manager of an institution in Arusha, then as Commercial Manager of an Airline.

After leaving the airline, my husband and I started a consultancy firm. It was then that I developed a passion to improve the capacity of non-commercial organisations, coming up with a model that improved service delivery. If you have read my book entitled ‘Value Adding Woman’, I went deeper into how I got that model through divine intervention. Being passionate about building capacity is not surprising since my parents were both educationists. My dad was involved in starting Ndejje University and the PhD program in Education at the Uganda Christian University while my mum was a school inspector.

Back to our service improvement model, it took the country by storm with noticeable changes in organisations that embraced it. In a nutshell, we would start with a mystery shopping visit to observe service delivery gaps as well as successes; thereby packaging the content for the training. As in any other educational institution and indeed as I had learned from the Technical Trainers Award mentioned earlier, participants had to complete a ‘pre-course questionnaire’ to understand their strengths and weaknesses in customer care; and what participants expected from the course. The mystery shopping visits were followed by a three-days ‘customer care awareness course’ that would be tailored as much as possible to the findings from our visit and the participants’ pre-course data. Thereafter, we would assist the client organisation to put up a system for monitoring and evaluating their service delivery improvement initiatives, combining ‘customer-oriented service improvement teams’ or CSITs with business process mapping, development of service delivery standards, clients service charters, service level agreements or commitments, performance appraisals, complaints management systems and client-centric strategic plans. Although the courses were paid for, the follow up, which could in some cases take more than 12 months of advisory services, was free.