Go to any establishment – school, office, NGO, or government – and who’s in front? Security guards, usually outsourced. These guys are the customer service frontline, and they’re not trained for it and give a generally bad impression. Any company or organization that cares about their reputation should think about the first impression a guest gets. By outsourcing initial service to security guards, that impression is generally bad.
Security Guards
Being a security guard sucks. The pay is low (I’d guess like 10,15k, though I saw an ad posted from the American Embassy offering more than I made as a journalist. Which was like 20k, but still). Need to start a new sentence here. The pay is low, the hours are long, and its generally thankless. Shifts can be 24 hours (or more) and you generally have to sleep, wash and eat all in kinda the same place. It’s kinda like being paid to sit in jail.
The Sri Lankan job market kinda supports this job, though. It’s generally unskilled, it pays something, and it is a job. For many people it’s actually desirable work. If I was writing a book or something I might consider it. I have no problem with the job itself.
Security Guards As PR
Basically, the entire Ramayana began with a security guard fail, at least karmically (The Origin Of Ravana). Rebirths back, Vishnu’s guards wouldn’t let a visiting sage in to see him. The sage cursed the guards to 10 bad rebirths (their impatient choice) and hence you got Ravana and Kumbhakarana, reborn to be killed by Rama (Vishnu incarnate). So, your frontline customer service is really important.
When security guards are not trained in dealing with people (or anything for that matter) they end up doing stuff like telling you where to park… after you’ve gotten out of the car, or telling you to wait when you perhaps don’t have to wait, or generally not dealing with people professionally. This is not their fault, they’re security guards, not customer service.
However, for any major company in Sri Lanka, if you go to the head office, that’s who you deal with. They’re not trained to smile or greet you in a certain way, they just take your ID, make a call and usher you up. Ideally, you should have someone well trained there to make people feel welcome, not piss off important visitors, and generally make a good first impression.
Instead you get outsourced, underpaid staff giving at best a mediocre impression and, at worst, triggering some devastating war 4,000 years hence.
Couple of things more:
Security guards are not authorized to stop nor control road traffic. But they do get into the middle of the road and stop vehicles to give way to their customers to [illegally] reverse towards the road. And sometimes they do this to make way for a senior figure of their organization, and do not realize that the particular person is a senior person only within the organization. I hate the “chairman mahatthayata yanna ida denna” type attitude shown by security guards who try to stop me on a public road. And the use of “try to” there was deliberate. ;-)
To be fair, the police do that too to make way for senior police officials, but at least they are legally entitled to stop the traffic to make it “less illegal”. Again, that doesn’t make it any more correct, but the one about security guards is totally illegal.
Also, security guards do all kinds of odd jobs. While this reduces the security because they do other things than security, organizations seem to be ok with it because then they don’t have to pay someone else to do those jobs.
Not connected to this, but beware of fellows directing traffic or helping you to reverse if you’re anywhere near the Psychiatric Hospital at Angoda. There are some patients who are allowed to roam freely and they love to misdirect traffic, just to hear a crash at the end. This happened to my brother’s friend recently.
I once drove to a car sales down union place to find there is no parking at the stop. I rolled down my window and asked the security guard, where I could park? he was like “our parking is full, It’s better if you can come back later?”. Yeah, untrained security guards can potentially damage revenue too.