Guyana business culture in need of a major overhaul While Guyana is positioning itself as the gateway to South America for increased trade and investment and implementing major infrastructure projects to facilitate this, much more attention needs to be paid to ensuring quality service standards at all levels.

The generally poor service culture and business practices, which cause so much frustration to both locals and visitors, should be addressed with some urgency.
The importance of professional image, outstanding service, efficiency, courtesy and follow up are necessary if Guyana is to be regarded as a business location with globally acceptable standards and if overseas entrepreneurs are to have confidence in doing business in Guyana.
Image starts with the service at the airport, where there is dire need for training. Apart from no welcome most of the time, you are greeted with mostly stern faces. The words “welcome to Guyana” or “enjoy your stay” should be standard, along with a smile.
Leaving the country can be exasperating given the length of time it sometimes takes to process one passenger. Perhaps, more effective monitoring and supervision when the lines are backed up can alleviate the situation, which has been known to cause delays in flights taking off. Regarding image, some government and private sector offices could do with a serious makeover, especially those that are tourism related and where visiting business officials and potential foreign investors have to go. The officials from some of these organizations should make an effort to see what some of the tourism offices in other Caribbean look like, not to mention their overseas offices in North America.
Government Ministers and officials should make it their business to see the washroom facilities their visitors have to endure. This includes broken toilet seats and no soap. It is mostly appalling and the words “no class” is often used by visitors. Washroom facilities on the whole in Guyana is a major issue. In other Caribbean countries like Barbados, all major department stores have well maintained washrooms with toilet paper, which is treated like gold in many government offices. Does this sound like the ambience for visiting business officials and tourists?

Both government and private sector agencies should make an effort to modernise their offices with local furniture and create an attractive and more welcoming ambience to replace the cramped conditions that currently exist. Putting people to sit on benches, as is the case at some Ministries, is insulting. An investment in chairs is not that expensive.
And if we don’t stop talking (for over a decade) about the garbage situation and take visible action to clean some of the stink streets and unhealthy rubbish piled up throughout the city, visitors will continue to talk about this when they return from their trip. This word of mouth publicity can do the tourism industry irreparable harm.
When it comes to customer focus, some of the banks do not answer their phones. In the case of two I approached, the switchboard is not working for some time. You have to take a trip to the bank to discuss business. It’s apparently known that it is rather difficult to get through to a particular bank so clearly some of the banks don’t care about their reputation or that their customers are dissatisfied. The long lines, through the door and on the road for some of the banks are evidence of this.
Placing food orders can also be an ordeal. I had to place one order three times. The first guy who answers the phone takes the order and then tells you he only answers the phone and then the lady that he passes the phone to takes the same order and then says she is the cashier and doesn’t take orders and you then have to plead with the third person not to have you repeat the order yet again.
Talking about food, imagine an established company serving food to close to 200 overseas guests at a conference and having one food station with a long line up, not once but twice, even though the company was asked to ensure there was more than one food station. While the food was excellent, the service was disastrous to the point that people came out of the line and sought to get a meal elsewhere after paying U.S. $150 to participate in the Caribbean event. Is anyone supervising these kinds of catering operations?
Having dinner at one of the oldest hotels in Guyana was also an unpleasant experience. While trying to eat dinner, a waiter rolls around a trolley with drinks with an annoying noise that it almost gave me a headache. Many hotels don’t offer decaffeinated coffee or tea and on more than one occasion I have observed that photocopying services were not available because the printer at the business centre was not working for a few days. With printers so cheap, surely there could be a back-up one.
The trend of officials not respecting people’s time unfortunately continues when on overseas business. It is now common practice and widely expected that if Guyana has an event or press conference in North America, that the event, including press conferences, will start at least an hour late. This is rarely the case when Barbados, Jamaica or Trinidad or other CARICOM countries have similar events. This is all about proper organisation as well as respecting people’s time.
Guyana is also getting a reputation of having inappropriately dressed representatives, including diplomats, at business functions overseas. Hopefully, the Ministry of Foreign affairs will pay some attention to this.
A few persons have been delivering badly needed training in frontline and managerial skills in Guyana over the past few years, but I believe Guyana needs a major dose of customer care, supervisory and business etiquette training across the country at all levels. If we are to become a leader in sustainable tourism, having attractive facilities alone won’t cut it with visitors.
Guyana needs, among other things, to participate in the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s Total Visitor Satisfaction programme.
On my list of areas for improvement are the arrogance, unprofessional behaviour and discourtesy displayed by some public officials. This includes keeping people waiting for hours at their offices, the practice of not returning emails or phone calls (these individuals have Secretaries) or taking weeks to return calls, even to diplomats. One most recent case was when a request was made to the Secretary of a high-ranking official for a meeting with the said official for a visiting Ambassador, whose country is pumping a significant amount of money into Guyana. In this case, there was not even the courtesy of a return phone call.
Having voicemails that are always full tells callers you don’t want to be reached. Surely, these officials known for this practice must be aware that in a small society like Guyana these things are no secret and damage their reputation.
It is also unfortunate that Guyana officials continue on the road of last-minute planning for events overseas and do not yet understand the importance of having people trained in marketing and event planning. The inexperience and unprofessionalism displayed is truly embarrassing.
Our overseas missions are in dire need of training in international marketing and trade promotion, including having databases of potential business prospects, other than Guyanese. Guyana has tremendous potential for investment, trade and tourism expansion but it has a lot of work to do to improve its image where service, courtesy and professionalismare concerned.
Efforts should include teaching customer care and business etiquette in schools, doing more surveys on the services provided by both government and private sector agencies, and taking corrective action to address well-known deficiencies.
(Sandra Ann Baptiste is a business consultant and specialist in Caribbean Affairs).