The Hindu Business Line : They also serve

John Milton's famous line "They also serve who only stand and wait" is true even now. Yet, if we but stopped to look around us in our service economy, those who make a living in trading and associated services in our society are treated by almost all, except the unemployed and the destitute, as being in some way lower on the totem pole. This is regrettable. It is certainly undemocratic and un-egalitarian. What is less obvious is that paying scant attention to the sector could be harmful to our interest in developing a service-based economy.

Our daily life is indeed surrounded and governed by the service profession. The more gadgets and appliances you have, the more things seem prone to malfunction and the greater your need to reach for repair, maintenance and service personnel... and wait. We as a nation never measure or value personal time, yet such waiting time and downtime have a huge price. The crunch, however, is that as the population of vehicles on the road and the installed base of everything from computers to dishwashers is increasing daily, the shortage of trained and efficient staff to man the showrooms and service stations is beginning to show.

In fact, this underlines the need for far better attention to the people who manage and run the sales and service people that a dealership requires. Dealerships deserve more time than they have received either from academicians or business managers.

To begin with, they are in more direct and close contact with the tough world of the bazaar. Relentless competition for a capricious customer is their daily life. They are even more affected in this than the brand managers and sales managers who direct them to implement the marketing plans.

Typically, the corporate world is protected from reality by a shield of financial power. The dealership manager, usually the owner, is not so fortunate. He has built the business with his own hands or inherited it from his family and is proud of it. His independence and self-esteem are the perquisites of his life.

There was a time when the dealer community was a distinct social and cultural class from the company manager or the sahib — brown or white. The present generation is better educated and city-bred. In the cities at least, they might have gone to similar schools and are as likely to belong to the same sort of social clubs and circles as the corporate executives. Indeed, they must not only be sophisticated, but also made of sterner stuff.

The leadership tasks of running a service business, especially family-owned, have recently become far tougher. They can never compete for talent with the manufacturers themselves, as their salary scales and service conditions are acknowledged as inferior. Worse, the growth of organised corporate retailing and outsourced jobs that have a foreign brand attached to them have together shrunk the supply of educated and trainable school-leavers. Even after getting them in, retaining them is a challenge, given the restlessness of the 23-30 age group, from which the service trade seems to be drawn.

The burden of people-management and training falls solely on the owner manager, who has little time and less money, to seek the wisdom of our expensive business schools through appropriate development courses Enlightened managements of companies contribute a good deal, as when the outlets are exclusive franchisees. Nonetheless, keeping employee interest and motivation levels high in the face of a demanding customer population is an onerous task. Indeed, those good quality dealerships that are aware of the human resource issues come up with innovative and resourceful solutions, which, in a strangely paradoxical way, can one day become useful pointers for company managements as well. In their search for new and low-cost solutions to the problems of retaining and obtaining organisational commitment from a young work force, while living with very small margins, the dealer community might one day become object lessons.

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