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It has taken me a long time to realize that here in the Philippines,
bills from major utilities and service providers are frequently
incorrect. This is a major cultural difference; in Europe it would
be very unusual to receive a bill that was incorrect, but here it
appears to be an accepted fact of life (and of course they all come
monthly, so there are lots more of them).
Dealing with this apparently small quirk
requires a lot of wasted effort to address. To get a statement of
say a year’s billings and payments is a major challenge;
shouldn’t information like this be issued as a matter of course?
From an annual statement it is easy to see if the same number of
payments have been made as have been billed.
Poor billing accuracy and timeliness is one
thing, but when combined as it is here with aggressive debt
collection efforts it becomes a nightmare. Don’t pay, cut you off,
whether the bill is right or wrong! One service provider agreed
recently that they hadn’t sent a bill but asked that we pay the
amount first, after which they would send it! Telephone queries
generally just beget standard “scripted” answers.
Greater efficiency in this sort of thing would
bring about better cash flows (perhaps?) accurate data.
I suspect that at the root of this problem is a
quality issue, basically you “get what you pay for.” Employing 5
mediocre people at the minimum wage is not necessarily as good as
employing 2 very competent people at P20,000/month. To say that the
procedures and training will allow for the employment of people at
the lowest wage rates is to miss the point, and to depend heavily on
IT systems for generating billings and debt collection (such as the
SMART telecomms) systems is a mistake. So basically this is a
management issue and put the way I have put it above is a management
issue which has longer term disadvantages to the Philippines
economy. The Philippines prides itself, and rightly on having a
friendly generally English speaking workforce, used to working with
foreigners etc, and there is no doubt that in many sectors the
quality of Filipinos is world class in terms of technical
competence—the medical profession for example. But Filipinos
generally blossom best when working outside the Philippines.
The quality issue here is not with the
professional grades, it is with the administrative levels who in
many cases appear to be subordinate to computer systems and not
given the opportunity to develop—“why would we do that when a
computer system can do the job as well (or better)?” It’s
another aspect of infrastructure, a quality administrative capacity
and capability is needed in order to make things work properly—if
a foreign investor has to employ more people than it would
elsewhere, purely to check frequently erroneous billings from
organizations that would be expected to know better and do a better
job in this area, then does it really matter that labor is cheap? I
think not, foreign investors need a ready availability of competent
administrative people, and to have this in the Philippines needs
“incubators” where lots of good quality administrative people
can be developed. So rather than letting the ever increasing
capabilities of IT systems completely take over the administrative
function let’s please see a few opportunities for growing
administrative quality. Wouldn’t it be nice to talk to a real live
human being when calling PLDT or SMART, banks, or any of the other
organizations who operate those irritating computerized telephone
enquiry services which now, to add insult to injury also include
advertisements which have to be listened to before you can even get
to the menu. You never know this may even create a few more job
opportunities for those without specialized skills!—and lots of
those are needed, in the Philippines as in other less developed
countries there is a need to provide job opportunities rather than
reduce the high costs of employment, by replacing people with
“machines” as is the case in the developed world—hope I
don’t sound too much like a Luddite!
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Mike can be contacted at mawootton@gmail.com
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