Category: When Customers Rule!

Gandhi on Customers

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Intended for this to be a Oct 2 (Gandhi’s birthday) post. Better late than never.
I also know that I have mentioned this before. But then, there are still many who haven’t learnt from this.
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A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption to our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportuity to do so.

– Mahatma Gandhi –

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:

Recognize the unmeasurables

Check out this article by Jim Barnes on CustomerThink. I would guess that the article will strike a chord in most customer focus practitioners. My takeaways from the article –

  • We need some way to measure, capture and observe the softer elements of performance, those that involve how well employees interact with customers and how they influence the quality of the customer experience.
  • Organizations will increasingly have to ask: What kind of performance drives loyalty and positive customer relationships? And how do we encourage such performance?
  • Customer-tracking research and feedback must include questions that tap into how friendly, helpful and understanding employees are in dealing with customers; how they do at making customers feel comfortable and listened to; how well they instill trust and confidence in our brand, how well they diffuse confrontational situations, and over all how they make customers feel toward the company.

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