Mr Lee Yi Shyan at the Live Screening of the Season Finale of "Can You Serve", 20 July 2010

Opening Remarks by Mr Lee Yi Shyan, Minister of State for Trade & Industry and Manpower at the Live Screening of the Season Finale of Can You Serve at the Boiler Room, St James Power Station on 8.45pm, Tues, 20 July 2010

Good evening everyone.

I had great fun watching some episodes of the Can You Serve series. From coffee lounge to the Zoo, hotel setting to a retail store, from walking tour to reverse-bungee, on land, in air and on sea, with many demanding customers and awkward situation, I think our organizers have worked our contestants too hard! To all the 9 participants, I am glad you are well and alive. Well done!

I think I learnt a lot from this series Can You Serve. As I watched the participants’ reactions to the situations, and listened to the subsequent analysis by the panel of judges, I took away important lessons on the attributes needed in service excellence.

The first key attribute for service excellence is Passion. I believe you must be passionate in serving, in wanting to help your customers, in wanting to understand your customers’ needs. When you genuinely like to know and connect with people, you put people at ease, and immediately establish the rapport and trust with them.

In fact, passionate people will also do better in adversity. Because passionate people keep trying, even if the going is not well. In service industry, many things don’t always pan out the way you want it. So when you are faced with a different scenario other than planned, passionate people would think of the resources he or she can find to mitigate the problems, solve them or turn adversity into strengths. Passion is about whether you do something whole heartedly.

The second key attribute is Pride. Pride has to do with how one feels about the importance of what he or she is doing. For people with strong self esteem, he or she is confident on the job, takes the job seriously, and delights in a job well done. He is proud but not arrogant. He is confident, but yet ever so ready to listen and understand.

Workers who take pride in their work want to excel, they want to do well all the time because they believe they are doing something very important, even life-changing. People with pride in their work always seek ways to do a job better, always learn, always improve. People with pride dismiss setback with a sense of humor. Pride is really the best form of respect one can bestow to his job.

Once you find a person with Passion and Pride, I think you have found the raw material to be polished to be a sparkling gem. This is what the service industry needs. This is what Can You Serve series seeks to do: to help us identify people with the fine attributes for service excellence.

Can You Serve has been successful. Despite being an inaugural series, its viewership is on par with many other local shows. It has also gained traction in internet media such as Facebook.

And yet Can You Serve wouldn’t have succeeded without the strong partnership of the private and public sector. I would like to commend all the parties involved: Restaurant Association of Singapore, Singapore Hotel Association and Singapore Retailers Association, the 10 establishments that have made available their shop fronts or venue to host the shooting, for their commitment to changing the service culture in Singapore.

Their participation underlines their willingness to translate the service message to a larger audience. These establishments had to close their outlets for a day, with their management level executives taking time off their busy schedules to appear as guest judges. As such, they have become the show’s stars in their own right. We look forward to their ongoing support, as we continue our journey to build a culture of service excellence.

Our vision for Singapore to deliver a high standard of excellence will be accomplished. To get there we will need everyone’s effort. We will start from the heart – passion and the head – pride. Once we have these two enabling attributes, we can learn the rest of the techniques and the “how tos”. Let’s us embark on this exciting journey of excellence together.

Thank you.