Percci‘s Service Excellence campaign celebrated its second graduation ceremony yesterday with a R500 000 sponsorship from the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality.

The campaign, launched last November, aims to lift service in the city to international standards and had its first graduation in April.

Metro acting economic development and tourism business unit head Belu Mabandla, who handed the sponsorship to Percci, said service excellence and customer care were central to the success of every business.

“In fact, it is mostly understood to be a precondition for achieving growth in turnover, profits or market share.

“So if service excellence is one of those programmes that will make sure that these businesses stay in operation, it is our obligation as government to support it,” she said.

Yesterday‘s event saw 15 companies receive service excellence accreditation – bringing the total number of companies accredited to 22 and representing more than 1 000 employees.

These companies include Alexander Forbes, AlgoaFM, Comsec, Mandela Bay Development Agency, Uitenhage-Despatch Development Initiative, the Beach and Paxton hotels, Visionary Consulting, Ambiton Financial Services, Arnold van der Wat, Chris Meistre Computer Services, Eastcape Training Centre, and Inkanyezi Events Organisers.

To receive accreditation a company must have trained at least 60% of its staff through the specially designed service excellence course and have achieved 80% or more in a mystery shopping test.

Percci president Dave Coffey congratulated the companies and said they were entering the “risk area” as the public would expect them to live up to their accreditation.

Also they would be subjected to eight mystery shopping tests per year, he said.

Coffey said the campaign was picking up momentum, with the number of people trained in a given month rising from 160 in April to almost 400 last month.

“Our target is to train 100 000 people over the next five years,” he said.

He said Percci was developing promotional material to market the campaign and the accredited companies.

Prof Niekie Dorfling, dean of the faculty of economic and business sciences at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, said he believed service excellence was one of the most important initiatives yet embarked on by the metropolitan community.

The NMMU Business School was responsible for developing the service excellence training material as well as facilitating the training process.

“The level of service an organisation delivers to its clients differentiates that organisation from its competitors.

“Although this is true regardless of the industry focus of a community, it is more pronounced for communities where tourism play an important role,” he said.