LETTER: Licensing Department praised for resolving, attending to matter

• Mark Hollander writes:

Regarding my letter with headline Licensing Department is going downhill fast in the News dated November 5, the following:

I recently met with the Head of the Krugersdorp Licensing Department regarding my complaint about the driver’s licence that was misplaced.

I must admit that I did not expect much to come out of that meeting. However, to my surprise the Head of the Department acted in a very professional manner, contacted the Supervisor that was in charge of that area, who joined us in the meeting. Instead of just fobbing the incident off and doing nothing, they were very patient and intent on solving the mystery of my misplaced driver’s licence. We waded through video footage to determine where the process fell apart.

The issue was identified, action taken accordingly and later that day I received my misplaced driver’s license. Although the experience of losing my license was unpleasant, I have huge amounts of respect for management sorting this issue out.

Their mindset is that we are customers and that we should be treated as customers, which was evident while I was dealing with them. They may not be getting it right 100% of the time but as far as I am concerned they really got it right when it was needed.

When I walked out of that meeting, I walked out with a positive attitude that the matter was resolved and attended to, rather than the anticipated negative attitude of nothing going to be done when I walked into the meeting.

I do need to mention that the request for this meeting was done long before the incident was published in the paper and that the management of the testing department was the one that initiated and pushed for the meeting to happen in order to resolve the issue. I would also like to thank the DA in this regard.

Some tips or advice that came from the meeting:

1. Customer / client: Ask for management at the time that the incident occurred. I did however mention that when people are pressed for time as well as dealing/experiencing high levels of anger or infuriation when the incident occurs that one does not really think about asking for management.

Also, my opinion is that if you are too angry or infuriated to deal with the situation (as I was), rather back off, cool down and then deal with the issue. Far more is achieved when both parties are cool-headed and collected than if the situation was dealt with in a mood or attitude of anger, as my experiences have shown that nothing constructive has come out of an environment of anger and infuriation.

2. Testing station: I suggested that they should inform their staff to bring management in when the incident occurred as a proactive measure rather than the customer requesting for management as a reactive measure. People are far more infuriated when they have to ask for management as opposed to when staff bring in management to diffuse the situation.

This way it improves the negative perceptions of the customer rather than the customer’s perception of that we are not customers but just public people being exploited for their money.

As you can see, I walked away from the meeting feeling that it was a win/win situation rather than an outcome of win/lose situation where I landed up being the loser.