While most parts of the world are making great strides towards the enshrinement of workers’ rights vis-à-vis maintaining a healthy and motivated labour force there are still those companies in modern day Nigeria who embarrassingly refuse to grow up out of the dark ages. A prime example is Team Morale Ltd, a service provider for Hello Nigeria.

Rumour has it that Team Morale Ltd managed by Doctor Pep Talker, a two term Chairman of the Committee of Approved Nigerian Telecoms Operatives is fronting for top heads at Hello Nigeria such that he was able to successfully get the outsourcing contract from Hello Nigeria for its’ Online Call Centre in Jang which has now become its’ biggest such unit in Nigeria surpassing other such units in Eko, KD and Kan Aminu.

Investigations reveal that the condition of its’ staff at The Jang Call Centre can best be described as modern day slavery. Or what else do you describe a situation in which after almost a year of operation staff there do the same work with the same targets as their counterparts in Eko, KD and Kan Aminu yet earn one third their salary and don’t even have the privilege of owning staff lines.

Hello Nigeria’s Jang workers are the most poorly motivated Call Center Representatives you’ll ever find in any Nigerian telecoms firm. A look at the behaviour of Team Morale Ltd’s HR right from the recruitment stage will show the total disregard Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd has for its staff. Hundreds of youths were deceived to leave behind better paying jobs and bare the risk of relocating to a volatile Jang in the hope of better work conditions with Hello Nigeria, one of Nigeria’s top GSM networks only to be hit with an inhuman offer of employment letter whose take home pay can’t even get them home on a regular monthly basis.

The end result of this is that Hello Nigeria’s Jang Call Center Representatives occasionally lose it, transferring their aggression on to their customers in a display of appalling customer service.

That Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd management can be very high handed is an understatement. Unfriendly policy decisions such as maternity leave with any form of pay and hoarding of Information especially as regards staff welfare is the order of the day, consequently with life at the Call Center resembling the dark days of military rule in Nigeria.

Staff are regularly punished with no form of appeal and sacked with impunity as evident in the layoff of no less than 30 workers since January 2011 for flimsy reasons such as merely offering positive suggestions which go against the managements ideal of how to move the company forward.

The rot in Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd is exemplified in that it’s Jang Call Center Operations Manager an expatriate, whose contribution to productivity is questionable has since December of 2010 being taking up residence in an hotel room whose bills for a day is enough to pay a month’s salary of the lowest of its Call Center Agent.

Staff role appointment is also to a large extent devoid of merit with the ranks being manned by many management yes boy and girls. With an ingenious divide and rule remuneration policy set up to reward such yes boys and girls on a monthly basis.

Rounding of this expose on a light note, with a population of over 900 and counting, a common Jang beer parlour gist is that Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd spinsters are the cheapest in town, easier than University of Jang female undergraduates as being eager for marriage to lift them out of their pitiable situation they have set their standards so low.

In conclusion all evidence points to the fact that a Sanusi Lamido like banking system cleansing would be welcomed in Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd.

Can you relate with this?

“The tellers and customer service ladies of Bank EW are just plain rude; imagine going to withdraw your own money and being told to wait for hours or to come back tomorrow because the servers are down; I don’t remember them telling me that when I came to open the account!”

“My sister I cried to my creator from the bottom of my heart today. I was made to feel subhuman just because I went to one office to submit my CV”.

“I can only blame myself for taking my own two feet into that place. The reply I got was so cold and unhelpful just for the simplest of enquiries. It was a total waste of time and energy.”

“Why do these ISPs keep employing clueless and dumb people? Can you imagine the guy at the help desk telling me “I was not trained to activate this plan on a phone. I can only activate on PC. Please go and bring your laptop”. Source.

“My people I don’t even know why we waste our time on this the Police is your friend mantra in Nigeria. Do you know that I always have to make sure the money in my pocket is enough before going to the Police station to report a genuine issue? It’s like those guys work on a pay as you go basis.”

If you can relate with all these read on, if not please quit reading.

Colleagues we’re in that shoe now with our present job, we can either prevent people from further experiencing and saying the same or we can tow the status quo. Let’s do away with the “everyone wants to fix humanity; no one wants to fix themselves syndrome. It begins with you, change begins with us.

Just like relationships crumble if one party doesn’t offer to say I’m sorry, or a traffic jam gridlock persist if one driver doesn’t say “I’ll be patient, you may go first”. Things can only be better off if we decide and start to make an effort.

Like the hotel bell boy let’s learn to work like our only form of remuneration was based on tips arising from the level of satisfaction our customers get from our service. Let’s learn to treat our customers like we would treat our mothers

Let the below thoughts and often made statements be things of the past

a) Nkemakonam Ezidinma Ifejika opined on Facebook that for Nigerians anywhere in the world, customer service is a gene extracted at birth. That is to say Nigerians are incapable of being consistently polite and helpful. They are the kings and queens of mood swings.

b) In Nigeria there’s no place for merit. We can’t queue or be patient. Everyone wants to cut corners and get served before others. It’s like a “my family comes first” credo. And that’s why poverty persists because those in top positions don’t allow for the wealth to flow down to the bottom, hence everyone wants to be at the top and so corruption is birthed. We were brought up this way and so bring up our kids in like fashion too. A vicious cycle.

c) There’s a deep rooted rat race or jungle mentality in Nigeria that impedes development and breeds nepotism and tribalism. Like Mark Shuttleworth said: “Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are “wrong by default”. It’s the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism.

d) Nigerians are only bothered about the self, there’s no sense of concern for maintenance of public/company property. That’s why the civil service is in shambles. That’s also why the white man is brought in to instil discipline; we then fight to go abroad to enjoy the perks of a disciplined society we have denied ourselves.

In line with the above and bringing the matter back home mycustomer advocates the following

1) And end to the “applications are not working please call back” sing along. Especially when we don’t even bother to get them working in the first place, have no idea of their workarounds or can’t even be bothered to remember our passwords. Food for thought: Do you know that telling a customer that the applications are not working please call back is akin to telling a pensioner who invested a lot of energy and money to go back home and come tomorrow because the bank for some flimsy reason or another cannot pay today.

2) It’s good to pick 200 calls a day but it’s even better to pick 150 and deal with them decisively. We’re lucky to have a strong brand and a consequent low elasticity of demand but we should bear in mind that ultimately customer service goes a long way in determining customer retention and business profitability.

3) Stop leaving your mails unread. You stand to keep yourself ignorant (no product knowledge) when you do so consequently manifesting in frequently putting your customers on hold and running around the call center asking questions. You also leave the knowledgeable customer shaking his head on the opposite side lamenting your cluelessness.

4) An end to the “I’ll end call on you”, “I’ll block your line” incidents. Let’s learn to manage our irritations and show compassion to the slow to comprehend and confused. You become a better person, the bigger man when you learn to tolerate customers venting their anger on you yet reply politely to empathise and educate. It shows there’s substance in your character; consequently you’ll see that people will want to look you up for a repeat dealing.

I now hope that upon everyone reading this, this other incidence that some of us regularly experience will decrease: “customers asking for a way to get back to us directly as they are afraid of speaking to others because they have no confidence their queries will be resolved on a random call back.

“Like the hotel bell boy let’s learn to work like our only form of remuneration was based on tips arising from the level of satisfaction our customers get from our service. Let’s learn to treat our customers like we would treat our mothers”

Anyone that really knows me in person should be aware that I like to be on top of things information wise. Like the seeker I take great pride in getting relevant info and go to great lengths to organize that info for effective use (I think I got this quality from my dad). And feeling particularly generous or scholarly today I want to bless you with my “Seven habits of highly effective information managers”; hereby referred to as HEIMs. On a Zain level I’m in a frenzy like one of my previous bank big boss, who was twice flown in from Lagos to lecture us in training school, and on both occasions ended up basing his talk (both talks independent of the other) on Stephen R Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. So let’s get started on capacity building information management wise.

1) HEIMs abhor illiteracy in all its forms because to really appreciate the importance of information management one has to be technologically aware, pragmatic and open minded. HEIMs would probably work in intelligence if they were in the army. For the young ones in secondary school my advice would be not to limit oneself to only reading the Bible, religious books and self help books but to explore the world of contemporary Nigerian fiction. Personally my favourite reads are informative/write ups/novels which come with a heavy dose of humour.

2) We would all the more be HEIMs in Nigeria if we probably had a good database management system in place. All my analysis leads me to the conclusion that if we fixed that we would be on the road to resolving a lot of our national problems. From census and population planning, to voter registration, to crime detection/prevention, to fiscal control and bank loan supervision, to academic records availability and so on and so forth. That’s why it behooves on us to take the issue of record keeping and maintenance seriously in our daily dealings. There are little things in life as sweet as being updated about the past in a jiffy and thus being privileged to make inform choices in the present that will affect your future positively.

3) HEIMs excel in phone bookkeeping and are forever grateful for the miracle that is telecommunication. They understand the beauty of talking the talk and getting thoughts across at the touch of a button. So characteristically they are always reachable by phone, text and call generously as the need arises, excel at colleting contacts of useful people and those they just must deal with on the daily, have a good contact backup culture, have more than one line considering the peculiar unstableness of our telecoms networks, and understanding the importance of networking strive for phone number retention. Some extra tips: for ease of backups you might want to jot down your numbers daily as you collect them and exploit the PC suite and sync function of your phone. Also aim for hand sets with unlimited contact storage. To get ahead 200 SIM memory plus 200 phone memory handsets are not the way to go. Additionally learn to save names in full or with descriptive suffixes for ease of recall.

4) HEIMs understanding the reality that is information overload, trash programming and junk content are constantly trying to stay geeky/nerdy yet work and leisure balanced. By analyzing and sieving what is available before brain consumption they stay on the natural high. Personally I try not to over indulge myself and stay away from things that don’t add anything substantive to my IQ. This means I’m constantly battling procrastination in favour of studying and computer programming. And when it comes to news feed, favouring blogs with original content as against gossip blogs and news recyclers.

5) HEIMs being aware of the power of the world wide web/computers practice the complete use of it as a means to an end. Here’s what you’ll find them doing. They streamline their email addresses as much as possible and harness the powers of Gmail and email clients. You’d be hard press to find them on the loosing end of domain drops because of unread/unreceived renewal reminders. They are on top of password management (at my former job FinnOne, a banking suite software failed partly because of the issue of password forgetfulness). And they embrace the idea of website and company portals as information nests. A case in point: it’s dumb…almost criminal for INEC not to publish the list of qualified candidates/test invitees on its website during it recent recruitment exercise. Also as seen in many companies the issue of sending out important memos/policy updates only via email without repository on the company’s portal for easy long term reference is akin to dishing out instructions and the receivers inundating it from one ear and letting it slip out through the other.

6) HEIMs are by nature effective. In line with this they wholly embrace the use of a diary in their day to day planning. Not being cyborgs people grapple with the issue of forgetfulness but HEIMs keep on top of their schedule and plan accordingly with diary entries and reminders. Be them electronically on phone/computers or in hand in books. A follow up trait of effectiveness is getting things done without having to be prodded and doing so as if the direct gain was for oneself. In other words HEIMs treat with dispatch issues which require their attention. And in doing so they keep it scientific, scientific in the sense that their workings are carried out in a way that on analysis a third party can easily understand what has transpired thus and take relevant follow up action.

7) Lastly but also very importantly HEIMs don’t have an attitude problem. With globalization should come the common sense that nobody’s indispensable and that we all need each other sooner or later and as such we should treat each other with courtesy and respect. On a Majek Fashek-2face Idibia tip, little little patience and cordialness in our conduct now can have big positive implications later. Tolerance, politeness, a thank you here, excuse me or sorry there can in some way get you that information when the need arises that’ll help you break fronts.

The world Cup South Africa 2010 being now 40 days away, the true Super Eagles fan should have these three World cup songs on his/her playlist:

1) Power of Naija. Guinness commissioned World Cup song performed by Omawumi, 2face Idibia and Cobhams
2) Waving flag (Nigerian Version). Coca-Cola commissioned K’naan’s World Cup song performed by Banky W & M.I.
3) Goalaaaso (Inside The Net). Paj featuring Tolumide. From Paj of “Ghana go hear wien (2006)” and “skatta dem (Ghana go hear wien part II 2008)” fame.

Interpretation: I’ve now OFFICIALLY joined the prestigious group of people with a first degree from UNN. I sent the above sms to some friends. Here’s my favourite reply; it’s from Stanclef:

Your next target, the labour market/
You’ve got your statement, the future is now the present/
Get a job, get married and raise rugrats/
Finally hommie congrats/…go get high

So I’ve got two months before service, seems I’ll be interning at one of the radio stations in Abuja. Let’s see how it goes.

Catherine: What do we do now, Nick?
Nick: Fuck like minks, raise rugrats and live happily ever after.
Catherine: Hate rugrats.
Nick: Fuck like minks, forget the rugrats, and live happily ever after

One of the classic movie quotes/last lines. It’s from Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas’ Basic Instinct. Talk about being pussy whipped.

WorldCup ’06…it’s almost over; just had to put in some of my observations. Have you noticed the alarming number of early goals scored in this tournament; particularly in the group stages and in the second round? By early goals I mean goals scored in the first ten minutes, and to be precise in the fourth minute! It almost became a ritual, game kicks off and I’m looking at my watch. Four minutes later, pronto! The net is shaketh. It’s really that easy…or is it?

Have you also noticed the glaring similarity of team jerseys? I swear it’s annoying; uniqueness has been thrown to the winds, as except for colour teams now wear virtually the same jerseys! There was no difference between the white jersey of the Swiss and that of the Tunisians. Both teams were kitted by Puma (the main offenders in this case) who kitted a total of twelve teams at this finals, all with the same design template. What ever happened to the good old France ’98 days when each team had a completely different jersey design from the other even if kitted by the same sports company? Uniqueness is a much cherished human value…what more when it comes to national pride it goes without saying.

Johan Djourou of Switzerland and David Jemmali of Tunisia

Has anyone resident in Nigeria being having GSM voicemail issues? Well I have, but this article really put me through. You might want to check it out. Just know that the default voicemail number for Globacom is 0805111 and that of VMobile is 08020100155.

Since it’s all about me/I just bought me a V/this is TRAE to the zee/phone number number three/. That’s the text I sent out to some of my peeps to tell em I just got a V-Mobile line. Glo hooked me with their sms, V-Mobile with their voicemail, MTN with their…i don’t know. It was the only option as at the time I bought it. It’s gone now though. Least I forget our favourite GSM e-zine is back! More power to Sagai J. Adam.

It’s really kind of funny the hatred some people can have for you. If I was a Nigerian politician I’d say my life is in danger as the dynamic duo of Nubiansoul and Sokari want to assassinate me … assassinate my character. In another way it’s kind of shocking. It’s like an evil dictator versus activist scenario, where the activist goes to any length to see to the evil dictator’s downfall. Damn ma, agreed I have my short comings (but who doesn’t) but if you really get to know me you’ll see that in truth I’m the harmless simple version of the mister nice guy brand (not to be confused with nice guy syndrome oh). Abeg live and let live jare. Thanks.

================================================
INTERVIEW WITH GSM QUIZ COMPETITION WINNER: TRAE
================================================

CONGRATULATIONS ON WINNING OUR GSM QUIZ.
HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN YOU READ IN THE EMAIL
THAT YOU HAD WON?

I felt happy naturally, but some how i expected i’ld win.
Cos i acted fast in suppling the answers and they were
all correct.

DID YOU ANSWER THE QUESTIONS OFF-YOUR HEAD OR DID YOU DO
A LITTLE RESEARCH?

To be honest with you man i owe my success to google…
and of course my personal interest in GSM matters and my
natural inquisitiveness habit. I researched on all the
questions with google.

THE QUESTION ON THE MEANING OF “MTN” KNOCKED PEOPLE OFF.
MOST SAID MOBILE “TELECOMMUNICATIONS” NETWORK. HOW DID
YOU GET IT?

As i said i googled it all up! But it took quite some
time to get the answer though.

HOW DO YOU KEEP YOURSELF INFORMED ON CURRENT TRENDS IN GSM?

Well on the internet i rely on your newsletter and the
mobilenigeria site almost 99%. Besides that i read the
papers, listen to the radio and watch the news.

AND FINALLY, HOW DID YOU SPEND THE FREE AIRTIME?

Texting, flashing and more texting.
Made a few calls though.

Interview in session; Listen and learn a thing or two. Lord knows I’ll be granting many more interviews in future (smiles).

1) They have much cheaper tariffs than MTN. on the Glo network it’s 70k on per second billing to call Glo lines and 80k for other networks. As against MTN’s 80k irrespective. It’s also #7.50k to send text to Glo lines and #15 to other networks. As against MTN’s #15 irrespective.
2) Their recharge cards are affordable with longer access days/validity and easy to get unlike MTN. Glo has recharge cards of #500 and #1000 with 5 and 10 days access days which are widely available in the market. MTN on the other hand has #750 and #1500 recharge cards with 5 and 15 days validity respectively. Even their so called affordable #400 virtual top up airtime is very scarce in the market and has a validity of only 4 days. To compound problems the #750 and #400 airtime sells for #800 and #450 respectively in the market. That if you ask me is open exploitation.
3) They the most advanced network in Nigeria. They got the GPRS, WAP and MMS (something very common and indispensable abroad, it’s still catching up here sha) thing, which MTN doesn’t have. As the experts say they got a 2.5G network while other networks operate 2G networks.
4) They allow you to send 35 free Glo to Glo text per month. Something MTN can never dream of cos they’re the greedy network type. Like coolapostle said MTN = (M)ilk (T)hose (N)igerians!
5) Calling customer care on Glo is much easier than on MTN. And they only charge you #20 no matter the length of the call. Now tell me which network cares about their customer’s satisfaction more.
6) Glo doesn’t disturb you when your credit/access days (validity) is about to expire as much as MTN does by telling you to please top up your account as if you don’t already know. They’re like some cyber cafe’s timer software. they disturb you when it’s about to finish but not all the way till it completely finishes.
7) Glo tells you your validity/access days straight up (when checking your credit balance with #124#) unlike MTN which charges you to do so (by calling 556) or puts you through a rigorous process to do so (texting “8″ to “131″, it’s free of charge though).

What more can I say. Glo is the shit and MTN are clearly not performing. MTN only started the per second billing after Globacom brought the competition to them.

Now I’m beginning to feel like them Firefox loyalists who despise Microsoft and are highly anti Internet Explorer. It’s like I’m supporting the better company against the more popular but greedy and less efficient company. Ha-ha, whatever. I guess Glo have finally got me like they planned to do on their ongoing promotional tour of leading Nigerian universities. Shit I’m regretting why I wasn’t on campus for the show, I heard it was lots of fun and Ruggedman (Ehen!, Peace or war, Baraje. Big bros and Oh oh are definate hits. Nice skits too. Rest of the album ain’t too impressive) was on stage. Anyway the good thing is that Glo’s now in Nsukka and being that they’re also in my villa and of course Abuja (the three places I’m mostly at) my switch to them is all the more wise. I ain’t gotta worry about MTN now. I guess what I’m about to do ain’t so advisable security wise but am a do it anyway. Here’s my new Glo number: 08057058033 (+2348057058033), and my MTN is 08036135788 (+2348036135788). Although the best bet on reaching me these days is to holla at my Glo. Nice numbers hey?

it’s no more get Firefox and fuck Internet Explorer, it’s now get Glo cos MTN is a no show!