Category: examples

Amazon executives on same page wrt Customer Centricity

While talking about corporate creativity, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels mentions about Amazon wanting to be the world’s most customer centric company. The same theme can be read & heard in quite a few of Bezos’ interviews as well.

Note that the Amazon executive team seems to be on the same page wrt their overarching goal. Once this is clear, as Vogels mentions, all other decisions become more abvious & actions that much easier.

Other posting on the subject:

Partnering vs signing deals

From an Ericsson, Nokia or IBM’s perspective, this is a fantastic way to commercially partner with customers than just sign multi-million dollar deals.
With the $ spent coming under pressure due to macro economic considerations, this would be a interesting way for service providers to increase their customer base.

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“In keeping with that underlying philosophy, Bharti Airtel in 2003 signed outsourcing contracts with telecom vendors Telefon AB LM Ericsson and Nokia Oyj as also computer and software service provider International Business Machines Corp., or IBM.

The contracts, which transferred the costs of phone and computer networks to these firms, focused on cutting down costs while at the same time throwing in incentives for better utilization of the infrastructure.Ericsson and Nokia would get a base payment that would be linked to the voice traffic carried by the base stations and exchanges which are the core of a phone network, and would be a paid a pay-per-use incremental charge on that. “This way, there was both an incentive to perform better and a disincentive (that helps) to keep costs down,” chairman Mittal told Mint last year, reviewing the outsourcing deal for Mint. Besides, he had said, “there was no way we would have been able to add 20,000 towers a year (in fiscal 2007) if (we) were doing it ourself”.

An almost similar deal was forged with IBM, which received payments as a percentage of Bharti Airtel’s revenues. The arrangement, according to insiders, has sparkled for IBM — netting it revenues of some $2 billion to date. “Bharti is the most convincing case study (Sam Palmisano) can present to the world,” Mittal said earlier last year, referring to IBM’s chief executive. The vendor has since signed similar deals with India’s Idea Cellular Ltd and Vodafone Essar.”

Source: http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/07235634/Sweat-the-buck-more-is-Bharti.html

Over the last couple of weeks, a business trip too me across 4 time zones / 10 flights / 9 cities in a period of 2 weeks. I have to mention to you an air hostess experience on one of these flights –

A passenger seated next to me was asleep when the air hostess made the “beginning decent – buckle up” announcement. In a few minutes, an air hostess walks up, wakes up my neighbour & tells to buckle up as already announced. Just as he was buckling up, he is curtly told that the announcement also asked passengers to straighten the seats.

A couple of days later, I was on the same airline & came across another similar incident.

This time an air hostess walks up, apologetically wakes up the passenger. Requests him to buckle up & straighten the seat. When the passenger forgot to straighten the seat, the same air hostess returns to courteously requests him to straighten the seat again. She quickly adds that some of the seats have a problem of tilting on their own at times.

Which customer experience do you think will result in the customer having a positive feeling about the airline?
Factually, the air hostess in the first case might be correct. But does anyone want to be reminded about it? How many of us are purely rational?

BW Customer Service Champs

Business Week has recently released its annual list of customer service champions.

Some of my notes & observations –
  • The list is dominated by car manufacturers & hotels.
  • When anyone mentions car rentals – Hertz is the first name that comes to most people’s minds. But Enterprise seems to be ahead in quite a few lists – including this one.
  • Some adopted tips & tricks – 24 hour service chat on the web; freebies – especially car servicing; happy employees leading to superior service; focus on customer’s overall experience; involvement of the top execs; etc.