CARE Programme And ENDS Prime Examples Of Innovation In Customer Service

Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Dr. the Hon. Nigel Clarke, has hailed the COVID-19 Allocation of Resources for Employees (CARE) Programme and E-commerce National Delivery System (ENDS) as prime examples of innovation in customer service.

Speaking at a Jamaica Customer Service Association Leadership Forum and Service Excellence Webinar on April 14, he highlighted how the health pandemic demanded that the Government take a new approach to delivering service to its customers – the people of Jamaica.

“If you think about the challenge that we faced then, this was a new kind of crisis. It was a crisis where demand was affected, supply was affected and the persons who were immediately impacted by the crisis were not persons who existed in any pre-existing social database. The challenge we had was ‘how do we serve these Jamaican citizens who are our customers? How do we get to them?’,” Minister Clarke asked.

He pointed out that this was done through the utilisation of technology, coupled with traditional means of mass communication that omitted the need for recipients to physically fill out application forms, present physical copies of identification and turning up at government offices for submission and collection.

“That’s an example of the Government, as the largest enterprise in the country, innovating to deliver a customer service experience to the customer that was outside of what history would have led us to believe was possible but was necessary, given the circumstances that we were under. That innovation allowed us to deliver the largest social programme in Jamaica’s history in the shortest period of time. It was all done digitally,” the Minister said.

He also cited a similar innovation with the recently piloted E-commerce National Delivery System (ENDS).

“We have seen that the restriction that had to be placed on commerce and on persons going about their day-to-day business has obstructed the way life used to be. However, we have had to find a way to innovate around that and the innovation that businesses in the private sector have been engaged in is nothing short of noteworthy. The innovation that is known by the acronym of ENDS is a commendable innovation that has at its root, customer service,” Dr. Clarke added.

The Minister spoke on the topic: ‘Importance of High Service Standards in Sustainable Economic Development’, under the broad theme of the webinar, ‘Cracking the Service Code in the Virtual Space’.