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. 

The KISS that works...

Advertising and Marketing Communication often is expected to do wonders like we see in fairy tales. It is like the true loves kiss that breaks the evil spell and changes the life for the prince or princess or ogre in a way only imagined. It works much the same way with brands and their consumers. Brands are constantly in the search for those loyal customers who swear by their name and will never defect to competition no matter what. For consumers, from the wide variety of options at hand, is the basic need for the brand to serve its purpose as well as satisfy the need for association at a social level.

Like people, brands have personalities and much alike is also the fact that the less layered and complicated the brand personality; people tend to adapt to it faster are more closely associated. This is the reason why when we plan for the branding or communication for any brand, the governing fact has to be KISS (Keep It Short n Simple). The simplicity is a key here since layers not only distort the message but increase the number of time something has to be conveyed before the right meaning comes through. Shortness- well it is possible at times and most brands do manage to talk about their personality through a phrase and in around 3 words or less.

The basic purpose of branding was to differentiate one from another and somehow each time we talk about branding opportunities or brand manuals; it somehow seems dominated by visual aids.  I will not deny that the moment I think branding, my mind starts working on use of shapes, fonts, colours and trying to figure out a unique arrangement for talking about the brands persona. One possible reason I see is that an organisation needs to have an identity to start with business and the logo becomes the first point of establishing this. Another that shapes and colours are usually easy to identify. But once the brand has reached a level where it looks to hold a unique place in the minds of its consumers, other aspects like catch word phrases or audio mnemonics make more impact.

One problem I see with visual identities is the overcrowding of the space leaving very little scope for anything innovative. Indian or multinational large corporate groups seem to have sided with blue as a colour of choice. GE, Philips, Samsung, AT&T, Infosys, Tata, Ashok Leyland are just a few examples. Close on the heels is red. Coca Cola, 3M, Honeywell, Cannon, Virgin, ESPN, LG, Mahindra are just some who make this space. Not to mention how many use a combination of Red and Blue. So unless you have a yellow like DHL or the brown of UPS; the colour palette is running out fast. For symbols, the ‘H’ can be for Honda or Hyundai; the ‘T’ can be Toyota or Tata. The call is to make a breakthrough at some level.

If we look globally, most companies have picked up on catch phrases. The simplicity being that use of small words can have multiple meanings and endless possibilities to apply across the domain.  For instance Nike- They use the swoosh and ‘N’ as the identity on the shoes, but what the brand will today stand for is - ‘Just do it’. So what would be ‘Impossible is nothing’- the biggest competitor with the 3 stripes or 3 petal flower, Adidas. So why do brands so successful in their visual look for words as a part of its identity? I feel these simple words add in value. As much it works for brands abroad, it works in India as well. Things like ‘Utterly, butterly, delicious’, ‘Fill it, shut it, forget it’, ‘Taste the thunder’, all have a unique association in our minds.

Another sense which has been successful in terms of brand association is sound. Each time we switch on or turn off a Windows based PC, we hear a sound which we are so familiar with. We know what PC has an Intel inside it even on a radio ad. Nokia sound in a unique way; so does Samsung. It works so well that major phone networks in India like Airtel, !dea, DoCoMo all have a unique mnemonic sound to identify itself. Even Britannia and the corporate house like Reliance ADAG have an audio identity.

I guess these are a few brands where I felt it was just small and simple ways where brands have done things to just stand apart and make their presence felt. I’m sure there are many more- but then again; what works in my opinion is the simplicity in messaging to represent the brand in the most unique of ways and cut down the clutter. And more often than not the KISS works.