PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Singapore Service Excellence Medallion 2015

Ministers, Professor Cham Tao Soon, Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen

I am very pleased to be with you tonight to mark 10 years of the Go-The-Extra-Mile for Service Movement or GEMS Up.

In 2005, at the National Day Rally, I spoke about building a strong service culture because it was important if we are to build a strong service industry, and the service industry is a big part of our economy today, making up 70% of our GDP. And more importantly, we need a strong service culture because it sets the tone for the kind of society we aspire to be – gracious, courteous and respectful.

Ten years later, I am happy that we have made progress. 11,000 establishments have undertaken service excellence improvement projects together with NTUC and Spring Singapore. WDA has trained more than 200,000 workers in service excellence and will be doing more. The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore, which you heard about in the video just now, measured by the Institute of Service Excellence at SMU, shows that customers are more satisfied and we are catching up with leaders in service standards like US and Korea. Last year we had one horror story at least, about a mobile phone shop in Sim Lim Square that treated a Vietnamese tourist disgracefully, but we have many more accolades from customers and tourists expressing appreciation for the good service they received in Singapore!

We should celebrate our progress, but at the same time, we should recognise that we are not quite where we want to be yet. In fact, after I drafted this speech, this afternoon I opened the papers and found another report about Sim Lim Square in Lianhe Zaobao. Reading the report it is not so clear whether this time it is the shop or the customer who was at fault, but whether it was the shop or the customer, which led to this altercation, it reflects badly on Singapore and damages our reputation. If you ask any tourist, or even a Singaporean, which country has good service, I do not think Singapore comes immediately to mind. Most people would say Philippines, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong in the Asian region. You must ask yourself how these countries do it. Partly it is because of their culture; partly it is the temperament of the people, because service is in their DNA. For example, the Japanese take pride in serving each other. Even if you buy just one item in a 100 Yen shop, the shop assistant puts in her best effort to wrap up the item beautifully! I think at least half of the 100 yen must be in the wrapping. But other countries did not start off that way – Rather, they made major national efforts to transform their service industry and succeeded, like Hong Kong did after the Asian Crisis in 1997.

In Singapore, I do not think our culture and DNA are naturally service oriented, but we too can learn from Hong Kong and transform our service industry to do better. To accomplish that, everyone has a role to play - those who are selling, who are businesses and service staff and those who are buying, who are customers and consumers. The businesses and the service staff must strive to be customer-centric and build relationships with customers. The businesses must set the tone. They must embody the right corporate values, value their service staff, and have the right organisation and system in their companies so that frontline staff get the emphasis and the backing they need to give good service. One organisation that does this well is the National Cancer Centre, Singapore. When someone is ill with cancer, it can be a very trying time, for the patients as well as their families. The NCCS knows this, so they do not only focus on treating patients. They also tend to the emotional needs of patients and their families – they run programmes and support groups, and connect them with others in the same situation via a support network. These values are embodied in their staff like Mr Gilbert Fan, a medical social worker. Mdm Boon Yu Feng is a breast cancer survivor and an NCCS patient. She turned to Gilbert for help when her husband lost her job. Gilbert saw that they had three young kids and took it upon himself to use his contacts to help her husband look for a job, which speaks of his own values personally but also the ethos of NCCS. I spoke to Mdm Boon just now and asked her how things were, and she was happy, her husband has a job, the children able to concentrate on doing well in school, this year one PSLE, one O-Levels, one A-Levels. I said you are taking three exams this year, stay well and do well. The service staff also play an important role. They must feel proud of their jobs, care for their customers, and be willing to go the extra mile.

Like Mr D Suppiramaniam, a bus driver from SMRT, now a customer service officer in Woodlands Interchange, who is one of the Individual Medallion winners tonight. He was driving SMRT bus 913 one day when a little girl approached him and started crying. He asked her what happened, she was six or seven years old, usually she goes with her brother today she decided to go by herself and went on the bus in the wrong direction and went to the bus captain for help and did not know how to get home. He comforted her and kept her by his side, while he completed his trip and made his way back to the bus interchange. His only thought during the whole trip “What if this was my daughter? I would be very worried if she got lost and could not return home”. When he reached the interchange, he sought help to contact the girl’s grandmother and waited until the girl was reunited with her grandmother. I was talking to him just now and he recounted the story still full of passion and bringing up what was a memorable experience.

Or like Ms Idah Mariyani, from NLB who was helping one patron with printing articles, but the patron encountered difficulties with the software – sounds like me struggling with my computer – because the software was not able to print according to the margins the patron needed. So when Idah found out, she went out of her way to find other solutions, including finding compatible software and printing out the articles for the patron. It may seem like a small gesture but it meant a lot to the patron because she needed to complete her research paper!

We need good businesses and good workers, and we will do more to help them. But that is only one side of the equation. Equally important to this story are those who are buying things – the customers, because good customers inspire great service! If the customer treats a vendor well, the person will feel good, will get satisfaction and will go that extra mile. But if the customer treats the service staff like dirt, it makes it much harder to serve with pride and give you good service. Just because the person is serving us, does not make him or her our servant or slave. He is looking after us, and it is our responsibility to be courteous, be considerate and to thank him for his efforts to help us. How we treat each other, whether we value and respect each other, says a lot about what kind of society and people we are if we aspire to be a society that is gracious, courteous, respectful of one another. If we want to live in a place where everyone belongs, doing his part, excelling and serving with pride, then each one of us, we have to do our part. 

This is what GEMS Up’s new service vision is about. The vision is “All for Service, Service for All”. It stresses the important role everyone plays in creating a good service culture. It reminds us that all of us have a role to serve one other – it matters not whether we are service staff, or whether we are customers. You may be in the government, you may be in the private sector. You may be in the hospital to get treatment; you may be in the national library to borrow a book. But we can be customers; we can be service staff we have to deal with one another reasonably, courteously, graciously. At the 2005 National Day Rally when I talked about service excellence I showed two videos. The first video was called “Tao Gay Not Enough” – showing a hawker selling Cha Kway Teow who was rude to customers. But after making the first video and rehearsing the speech, we thought that this might be taken amiss by some hawkers who will tell me some other stories, so we made a second video called “Tao Gay Never Enough” – which showed the same hawker, this time the hawker was behaving well but he was serving a rude customer. I looked up the two videos and tomorrow I am going to post them on my Facebook so you can have a look at them. I said that all of us businesses and workers, as well as customers – have roles to play in creating a strong service culture. 

Now, very interestingly, the video of “Tao Gay Not Enough” got a lot of laughter because it was a Char Kway Teow man who was no good. “Tao Gay never Enough, the audience looked and did not know whether to laugh or not because it concerned our own behaviour and each one of us as consumers. Perhaps that is why we focused our energies on our businesses and workers in the past ten years. But I hope in the next ten years, we will not only upgrade our businesses and workers, but we will also all strive to be good customers too, all of us. And if we do so, we will create a virtuous cycle and our society will be better for it.

As I said at the NDR, we are doing this “not just for the tourists but also for ourselves because it is the kind of society we are. What we are, being gracious, courteous, respectful of one another, knowing that everybody has a place, a dignified place in Singapore, that everybody belongs, doing his part and excelling in his profession and serving with pride.”

That is the Singapore I hope we will live in, and the Singapore that I want our children to live in – a gracious, courteous society where everyone values and respects one other, and where everyone can be proud of what we can do and can do it well.

Congratulations to all award recipients tonight, both the businesses as well as individuals. You are the role models who will inspire others because you not only go the extra mile for your customers, but through what you do, you show us what kind of people we can be. Thank you very much and congratulations.

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