We are Customers- we need Caring

Customer is King- one of the most basic things we all are taught in a B-School. The justification for this super gyan is often that they are not an interruption to our regular work but the reason we have work and businesses exist. We will often find theories where people will talk of customer retention or how delighted customers stay loyal, but an essential key to all this is something most people tend to ignore: what is that your customer really wants.

Last week my father, a loyal customer and even a promoter of Reliance Communications for the last 12 years decided to opt for number portability and shift to Vodafone. Leading up to his decision was a rush of missed service opportunities to retain his loyalty. Reliance CDMA did not have the apt smart phone options which resulted in a shift to GSM. The GSM network was not having the desired penetration. Adding to this were service woes with the closure of their customer centres and online requests were going unheard. Not to mention that while billings were being cleared by ECS, neither a physical copy nor an online one was being shared. It would not take an expert to question why the shift was obvious; but the Reliance call centre while confirming the request to shift did seem appalled.

Retaining customers seems to have now deemed to be a low priority activity against building new customers acquired through sales. This is actually a very surprising aspect when we are still taught that 80% revenues come from 20% customers or the fact that building a new customer takes 7 -8 times more effort (both time and money) than retaining an existing one. Take for instance the fact that in a service oriented sector like aviation, only Jet Airways and Air India currently have a loyalty programme as an added benefit for frequent flyers. The rest I believe are making their run for customers purely by virtue of pricing wars.

My first job was a field service engineer of GE Medical Systems and as famously said by one of my manager’s then, “the service team should be the first and hopefully the last person the machinery owners should see for any of their needs. You are the man of the hour and along with your training, you have the final authority to take a call of what needs to be done”. Service at that time was looked as a key differentiator after technical specifications and in many cases, service assurance compensated for the lows on specs or high on price comparisons against competitors. Needless to say, we had 5 sales persons and 15 service engineers. We took pride in the fact that we attended most all within the assured 24 hours after the service call was reported. Faith was so high that we actually had to route our customers to the Toll-free number for the call centre to lodge calls since our variable was linked to response times. Things have definitely changed a lot since.

Today, the first step for most mid-sized companies to claim they are customer oriented is to register a 1800 – toll free number and run a backend call centre with 3-6 seats. The organic reflex as the load increases is an IVR system with a menu for language and service options where there is a facility to hold a customer in a waiting queue. When this gets loaded, certain routine actions are automated through key-in responses over the phone. Though if the customer base is increasing exponentially, the number of call centre seats usually do not go up in the same ratio and then we start to experience what I call the ‘King to Suffering’ phase. This is the phase when you are on hold for minutes on the IVR and yet unable to get the required information or job done to satisfaction.

Just take a small example- suppose you have a payment reflecting in your online bank statement and need some additional information towards accounting. A typical bank IVR works in this fashion: 1- language option, 2- bank account or credit card transactions, 3- enter the desired account number (this is read out and verified), 4- customer id and password, 5-account balance, ledger balance, uncleared funds, 6- repeat information or more information or any other account, 7- options to call for a cheque book, stop payments or talk to a phone banker, 8-wait in the queue and hope for a response in a few minutes. It can take about 4-5 minutes before you hear a human voice which can possibly understand your problem and offer a solution or escalate the matter to the right person.

So why did it take me 8 steps to hear a human voice from a bank where I am a customer against the 3-4 unsolicited calls I get every day (not counting the 10 e-mailers) for me to become their customer? No to mention, the power residing with a phone banker is so limited that they are actually incapable of immediate action beyond giving me a complaint number. It is thereby not a surprising that a common response can also be, we will get back as the delegation of power in such cases in questionable.

Considering India is a hub for BPO’s, I was checking on some global best practices IVRs and Customer Care and almost everyone mentioned that the choice to talk to a customer service agent should ideally fall around the 3^rd step. To get some additional data point on are customers satisfied with services, I picked up a global report on banking customers (yes, money matters most) surveyed by Capgemini. (http://www.capgemini.com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/wrbr_2013_0.pdf).

What is astonishing though is that globally, just about 51.3% people trust their banks and only 37% feel their bank actually knows them and their needs. And these are the stats when we talk of terms like ‘Customer Centric Approach’ in the corporate PPTs.

I guess it is high time the gyan moves from the board rooms and presentations into actual action. IN an era when there is no dearth of options, consumers will shift and the right trade-off between long term gains and short term doses of Viagra on the sales graphs. A customer may change by their needs; but the inherent feeling of being cared for, managed well and appreciated will never die.