The new Nigeria under a rating system.

“Please can you give me a 5 star rating” was his response as I jumped out of the Uber cab visibly infuriated at the level of disgust and disrespect I have ever received on a 5 minute journey. As I gave him one star, the Uber team responded within minutes to know what happened. I wrote down my grievances and they acknowledged and promised to act on all that had been said.

My friend also had a similar experience on Bolt and with the feedback rating, the Bolt team was able to de-register the driver, now he can no long register a vehicle under his name or ride as a driver in their database.

Rating, the rating system seems to be a new and welcomed trend as a feedback process, Hotels and restaurants also employ the use of ratings, Google most locations and businesses or service providers and there is usually a rating on the page. Most sellers on e-commerce sites have a rating, Apps have ratings, hair saloons, bars, nightclubs, even runs girls now have ratings, almost everything has a rating nowadays.

Ratings have become so important as a business tool that some customers hardly patronise a business or service without a good rating. Go below a certain rating and Bolt or Uber warns the driver that he’s score is not looking too good, and might need to improve his or her mannerism (quite bluntly).

Where do you think Nigerians need the rating system the most, I can think of a few, the bank! Long queues, I’m giving bad rating, poor service delivery, bad ratings, unruly staff, poor rating, unprofessional service, poor rating, over zealous security, poor rating, no customer pen, 0 star. Trust me I can go on and on.

NEPA/PHCN, takes light for 3 hours in a day, I’m giving them a poor rating, no light, 0 star, took their time to fix my light issue, 0 star, poor customer service, poor ratings, unruly staff, well you can guess.

Civil service, secretary want a bribe, 0 star, office took longer than 15minutes to finish my work, poor ratings, staff clearly doesn’t know what they are doing, 0 star

Forgive me, I know I’m hard to please, nobody is perfect I know, but when you see someone doing either the wrong thing or doesn’t know what their doing but do it with some courtesy, you can still get some positive rating even if you don’t deserve it, this is a form of diplomacy in interpersonal situations. Then again, if we didn’t have perfect or close to perfect systems like cars, planes and surgery, a lot of people wouldn’t use these services.

The rating system is good for service providers to know their own feedback and for regulators to know who or what is happening for all stakeholders. Directly showing these ratings online, or at entrances can help users make better choices to patronise or not to patronise a business, and where customer patronage is lacking, internal reforms need to be made.

Finding out if it’s a business process that’s bottlenecking operations or if it’s a personal issue only takes reading comments on the rating. Business owners can work at improving the services by addressing the rated issues and climb to higher ratings.

There always has to be a monitoring team to address and contact people who have given their ratings especially dissatisfied customers, if not, it would not be an effective system of accountability.

Rating systems should also tie into salary scales, here I’d propose that anyones basic salary can be earned but to earn higher on salaries, your ratings have to act in favour of your earning, just like a multiplier. For instance, a particular job at the bank would normally pay N100,000 to N250,000 depending on performance and grade levels, with a basic salary of N70,000 but with the rating system, a 5 star rated staff can earn up to N220,000, which assumes that the rest of his or her enumeration of N30,000 was multiplied by 5 which was a 5 star rating. Similarly a staff rated 1 star would not only get a query but get N100,000 where others got higher pays. Higher ratings for the bank, more incentives from the regulators, awards and accolades and better work environments for all.

I know it may not work as in the example above, but something close can be achievable, undoubtedly KPI’s could come to the rescue as some people are not very good with interpersonal skills. But the rating system if correctly implemented with a monitoring team could see great success in raising professionalism and upholding accountability in most business processes.

In all fairness, I’ve given multiple 5 star ratings to restaurants, Bolt and Uber drivers, apps on Google playstore, Apples AppStore and countless other places and think the idea of a society based on a rating system for goods and service providers would be a remarkable achievement in raising quality levels across good and service delivery. 




Written by Mundez

edmundez@me.com