Is this true?

A Chinese paper, Oriental Daily reported today that many of the tourists from China coming to Malaysia complained about the slow and unprofessional attitude of some of our immigration officers when processing their entry into Malaysia.

According to the newspapers, some of the tourists interviewed by the paper complained that many of these officers were chatting with each other while processing their passports , hence slowing down the entry process. This is despite of the huge number of Chinese tourists entering the country these few days.

Lunar New Year holiday in China is considered to be the “golden week” holiday. This year, because of the Visit Malaysia Year, many of these Chinese nationals chose to come to Malaysia for their holidays. New reports mentioned that thousands of them are flying in direct or coming in through the 2nd link via Singapore. These tourists will bring in precious tourist money which can help revitalise our retail economy.

A Macau tourist also complained that the officer processing her is very slow. It was alleged that many took an average of 5 – 7 minutes to process one visitor.

This perception will be very damaging to our country’s effort to promote itself especially this year.

Immigration officers are the first contact a tourist has with a country. Their professionalism and attitudes are very important to promote to the tourists that ours is a very friendly and efficient country. I am sure there are many good immigration officers. What is reported may just be a few black sheep, but these few black sheep can often create a wrong impression for the tourists.

I hope this news report would serve as a wake up call and hope that these officers can be more professional.

In private sector, when we are handling a client or customer, we do not normally “berbual bual” (chatting) with someone else. This is a basic courtesy and a respect that we pay to our client. Besides, chatting while doing work can often distract us and that is how mistake often occurs. ( read my article on ‘professionalism-put your soul and your heart into your work’)

I normally do not even answer phone calls when attending to my own patients. I pay 100% attention to them, listening intently to what they say and answer to every of their question, no matter how  simple the question can be. This, I believe, is one of the basics of professionalism.

Tourists do not owe us anything.

The efficiency of our civil service has improved generally but I believe we can still do better. Remember, our main competition is outside world. Tourists or investors do not owe us anything. They will choose us over the other destinations only if we are better, more efficient and more friendly.

In a nutshell, we need to constantly improve and upgrade ourselves in order to excel.