ZAGREB, Sept 2, 2020 - Croatia once again ranks third in the region for the quality of customer service, behind Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, the "GUEST-Regional Services" survey showed on Wednesday.

This is the twelfth survey testing the quality of customer service in the region, conducted between 15 June and 15 July by the Heraklea mystery shoppers agency in cooperation with similar agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia.

"Mystery shoppers" visited a total of 800 retail outlets in those countries - car dealerships, banks, petrol stations, small stores, supermarkets, telecommunication retail outlets, tourism-hospitality venues, and other services.

The criteria to measure customer service included greetings, identifying shoppers' needs, knowledge of the product being offered, offering additional products, and thanking shoppers for stopping by, based on the acronym GUEST that stands for Greet, Understand, Explain, Suggest and Thanks.

Croatia scored 75.1% and ranked third, the same result as last year.

Croatia again scored best on knowing the product on offer. Croatian retailers were also good when it comes to greeting shoppers and thanking them for stopping by. Their weaknesses included not identifying the need for shoppers and offering additional products.

Bosnia and Herzegovina tops the list this year

The best result this year was achieved by Bosnia and Herzegovina (86.7%), followed by North Macedonia (82.5%), Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Montenegro.

The best customer service in the region was experienced in car dealerships (97.2%), while supermarkets scored 58%, recording the greatest fall in quality compared to last year.

The biggest improvement in the quality of customer service was achieved by banks, increasing by 10.3 percentage points to 78.53%.

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As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 17th of May, 2019, the regional student competition, held at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, marked the completion of the SIM (P) ATIC PLC + Challenge 2019 project.

This project, initiated by the student association EESTEC and supported by the faculties of electrical engineering in Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, as well as by no less than Siemens, provides the region's young future engineers with a more detailed insight into the issues that engineers usually encounter in industrial automation in order to better prepare for such work out there in the real world.

Three winning teams, one from each country, as well as the overall regional winner were selected. The winning team from Croatia consists of Karlo Hercigonja, Ivan Ratković and Nikola Benazić from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, from Slovenia, the winners were Urban Aravs, Jernej Štremfelj and Tina Vindiš from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Ljubljana, and from Serbia, the team consists of Uroš Rakonjac, Petar Kovačević and Dejan Bogdanović from the University of Electrical Engineering in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The regional winner of the competition is the team from Zagreb, Croatia.

Namely, the SIM (P) ATIC PLC + Challenge 2019 competition started back at the beginning of April with theoretical part of the workshop, where university lecturers from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering from Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana held lectures otherwise not covered by the curriculum. In the next phase, the student teams solved the task by which the best two teams in the country qualified for the regional final in Zagreb. Within this competition finale, the finalists presented their respective solutions of the additional part of the task. Each team had ten minutes available to them for their presentations and five minutes to answer the questions from panel members.

Significant knowledge in the field of industrial automation was also demonstrated by other teams, all judged by a panel consisting of three experts from each country.

Each member of the panel evaluated teams from neighbouring countries in the categories of the quality of the created program and their presentation skills. The Croatian members of the panel were prof. dr. sc. Igor Erceg (FER), mr. Sc. Tomislav Pavić (A & C Automation Adria) and B.Sc. Marko Bunić (Siemens), while from Slovenia and Serbia, there were two university professors and one Siemens representative.

"This competition is an excellent example of synergy between faculties, students and economics. Siemens wants to support projects that encourage the development of professional and practical knowledge of future engineers from this area because we're also strategically focused on the areas of automation and digitisation, which were the cornerstone of this competition,'' said Medeja Lončar of Siemens at the award ceremony.

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