International bed bug week – South Africa – Cape Town

Well good evening team; hopefully catching you sipping your Ovaltine just before lights out.

Yes it was another successful day on the bed bug trail with our Cape Town Branch (Sales and Service) in South Africa. In less than three days we are really motoring and the media have engaged enthusiastically to discuss all of the perils and potential impact of this little bloodsucker on South African society and more importantly upon some of the big forthcoming sporting events.

Mike Potter did a further 6 radio interviews today including the prime time radio equivalent of the Today programme and believe it or not a radio phone in! More TV and radio planned for tomorrow morning and there should be lead stories in the Citizen and Daily News. It is amazing to see a country move from scepticism to conviction – a real lesson for us Europeans.

The rest of the day was spent with the Capetown branch on training and developing the proactive offer. I have to say we have a really impressive bunch of service managers, QA and sales managers who engaged, challenged and laughed through the day.

What was really great was that the techies were all highly experienced at bed bug jobs and so immediately benefited from getting into greater depth on the biological control side of bedbugs (more so than anywhere else we have visited so far). Moreover we got into a real debate on the importance of ensuring that all technicians were trained to a high level in this pest as it is clearly them who have the major interactions with the customers and can ultimately offer the most reassurance as our men and ladies on the ground. The service supervisors really bought into this as a major element of their role and emphasised that they could only do this properly if they could get more time in the field with their techs; it is interesting to reflect that this seems to be a consistent message that is coming from a number of different businesses across the world.

I think this session was one of the most vibrant sessions we have been in so far and I am really excited about how this great South African team will engage and interact with what promises to be a good turn out of customers tomorrow.

More bedtime stories from the front line this time tomorrow. (Ed: post was received on time, just not posted immediately.)

Night Night, sleep tight don’t let the …….you know the rest.

Pete

(Back to South Africa IBBW day 1)