Category: Musings

Why the topic customer centricity?

Over the last 10 years, my profession has taken me across the continents pretty regularly. Though most business travels are forgettable experinces, one part of the journey always resulted in a pleasant experince. Time after time, flight after flight, person after person – it was a consistent delivery of good service. I am referring to my travel with Jet Airways.

Jet Airways, I believe, revolutionized air travel in India. Not only did they end the hegemony of the state carriers (Air India & Indian Airlines), they also introduced quality service (usually associated with 5-star hotels) into air travel. Their service always stood above the rest – a distinct differentiator & contributed significantly to its stickiness to its customers.

(Photo credit to http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml)

A differentiator not only for the airline, but also for the Indian service economy. With the increasing size of this economy, it is very important for the industry to inculcate principles of experince based differentiation to build itself a strong foundation based on customer relationships & establish itself as a world beater.

I would be very happy if this blog contributes even a bit in this endeavour!

Is being customer centric altruistic?

Often qualities of altruism, sacrifice and benevolance are associated with customer centricity. The common perception is that being customer centric is tantamount to accepting a win-loose (the customer centric organization loosing to the customer) strategy. Best left to the realms of business idealism?

Being customer centric means that the supplier organization is sensitized to the world of its customers. What are their business challenges? What does it take to succeed in that world? What is my customer’s strategy? What adds value to my customer or their customers? Basically – the abiliy to get into our customers shoes.
Isn’t this something we see in a ot of successful people around us.

Apologies from a CEO

(Photo from stockxpert)
Thanks to global sentiments & a mega local IPO, the Indian stock markets witnessed choppy times over the last few days (it still continues in the same vein for now). The market swung crazily between new highs & lows. Accordingly, investors had a hectic time on the floor.
 
Here is an example of the cheif executive of an online trading portal apologizing to its customers about loss & lack of its service during various points the last couple of weeks.
+es
  • Who doesn’t falter!! But how many accept they falter!! This is the difference that an act like this highlights. Publicly accepting the short fall is the first step in one’s efforts to avoiding the same being repeated.
  • With this note, the CEO is setting a good example to his team – its oki to say sorry as long as there are genuine attempts to avoid repeats. This is also a public affirmation that the business values its customers.
-es (could’ve done better)
  • Going by my experince, many have had monetary losses of varying magnitude due to Sharekhan’s loss of service. Maybe Sharekhan should have explored material ways of compensating – even if it were to be a token act. Maybe a brokerage free day / hour / transaction, or a gift hamper, or a charge free service from the Sharekhan portfolio.
  • I would be delighted to see a Tarun Shah follow up mail a few weeks from now enquiring on levels of service. And Sharekhan should try & ensure there is a marked improvement in service during this period.

Have to say though that I am glad I am a Sharekhan customer. And glad to see a services organization raising the bar wrt customer focus in this space.

A lot more Indian services companies need to cover a lot of ground in this area – not because their service is bad, but more so because this segment intends to be world beaters.

—–
Dear Customer,

 

The last few days took all of us off guard. To make things worse, a lot of you faced issues with our service levels. Some of the issues faced by customers were trading system downtime, customer service cell not responding, fund transfer not happening etc. We don’t want to offer any excuses on why this happened as there can be no justification for the hardship you have undergone.

 

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to all of you. We will strive to make amendments in all the areas concerned to improve the service delivery to you. We exist because of you- our customers. It’s the confidence that you have placed in us that has resulted in us doing more than 4 lacs transactions per day and adding 45,000 new customers this month. We accept that we were found wanting on service delivery due to the sudden spurt in transactions/queries caused by this fall. We commit to improve upon the same in the days to come.

 

Warm Regards,
Tarun Shah
CEO
—–

Dilemma of Indian IT companies

Many an Indian IT company face a dilemma today.

With a strengthening Rupee & a weakening Dollar, margins of most companies are getting squeezed between Dollar earnings (mostly export oriented) & Rupee costs (salary costs are the biggest chunk in the costs).

The obvious choice is to control (read minimize) costs via employee salaries. How many of these companies can do a Southwest (that abstained from layoff in tough times) & continue to pamper their employees with 10-15% annual hikes? Or is there a better way of managing employee morale?