When I go to the vegetable vendor in my locality,
the personal attention & care I get is amazing. The shop keeper would know
what I want to buy, what vegetables my family likes, how much I buy, our
weekend routines & festive seasons, etc. He would select the vegetables for
me, fresh, green, tasty ones and if I don’t want to buy something he would
beautifully explain the characteristic of that vegetable, how and where it was
grown, why it’s good for health etc. If something is not available, he would
jump in to the next shop and get it for you.
On the contrary, every time I go the supermarket, I
say to myself –have patience! When I go to a supermarket, inspite of all the
great colorful interiors, variety of products neatly organized etc, I feel lost
in the crowd, the atmosphere very dull. There is no personal touch, least
attention given to individual customer needs. As I enter these retail shops, it
takes a while to figure out what is where? I have learnt to do it myself as
there is no point in asking the sales person, now after few visits, I may know
better than him or her. Once you find
what you wanted to buy, you will see many other things catching your attention,
all nicely packed and neatly stacked up. If you encounter something new, you
need to study and understand on your own by reading the printed lines on the product.
Ask somebody for help, who cares? The most common answer is, it’s printed on
the backside, if not the sales person will tell you politely to check it on
internet. They look so helpless, but
very busy talking among themselves, watching TV or may be just watching all the
people come & go.
Does Service Really matter to them or their
Managers? What a difference!!!
With hardly any education or training, Why should the
vegetable vendor be so caring and committed? The obvious answer is money, but
if you look deeper, it’s definitely beyond money, it’s about their love,
passion and commitment for their work. The vegetable seller would know anything
and everything about vegetables; we can clearly see how much they love vegetables.
The way they wash, hold, display each vegetable shows how much they care, not
just the vegetables, they equally care about the person who wants to buy them.
The Platinum
customer:
Sometime back I received a mail from my mobile
service provider Thanking for my loyalty and informing that as a Platinum
customer I will enjoy some special privileges like Priority access to the
service advisor, 100% assured express service recovery etc.
Incidentally just few months before I had series of
problems with this service provider and response was just pathetic. My GPRS
billing shot by more than 200% for no reason, first I thought may be it’s a
billing error but the same increase was reflected in next 3-4 months bills. I
called the Helpdesk and asked for the reasons for this increase and also shared
enough data on the past bills for the same usage and the service advisor said
she will call me back. I waited for a week, there was no response and I called
them again but to my surprise, the ticket was closed. I wanted to escalate and
I was put on hold for 15 minutes saying the Manager is busy, not available etc.
I kept on trying, many times the agent cut the line intentionally when I
referred my case and after 2 weeks I got a chance to speak to the Manager and
the response was worse than the first level support and there was no hint of
any resolution.
One day suddenly I got this brilliant idea to solve
this problem, just change the plan!!! 3G plan was anyway offered at almost 25%
of my GPRS bill. So changed to 3G plan and my billing came down drastically and
the reason for GPRS billing remained a mystery.
My billing problem got resolved but I got onto a
different problem. The 3G performance was very poor, it was not reliable, very
slow, worse than the GPRS speed and again I raised a problem ticket with their
helpdesk. It was again a long chain of events with no resolution, ticket was
opened and closed without my knowledge, when I called again they opened a new
ticket, somebody said it’s a problem with my mobile phone and again closed the
ticket.
While this was going on, I received this email
saying I am a Platinum customer enlightening me about the special privileges
etc. Now atleast I thought, there is some ray of hope, but platinum or steel, it
made no difference to the service advisor or his Manager. Then I wrote a mail
to Head of Services about my great service experience as a Platinum customer
and I got a prompt response saying the problem will be resolved on high
priority. Then followed a series of
calls & even visits to my house to check the signal strength etc and I was
told the problem will be resolved in a month’s time as they had planned for
some upgrades.
Now it’s quite some time since this happened,
nothing much has changed, I am still fighting with myself to come out of the
clutches of customer loyalty. Platinum
customer is just a label for some service leaders & their team and they may
never understand what customer loyalty is? Only the customer understands the
emotional connect with a brand…
Critical Reflections:
-
Do 1 in million customers really matter to very
large service providers? Is the customer taken for granted?
-
Why the customer support executives fail to go
beyond the rigid procedures & transactions and why they fail to understand
the real problems of customers?
-
Is the Service Leadership about building long term
service loyalty or just the growth and quarterly revenue targets?
- Why is the passion missing in Service teams and no focus on Value creation and differentiation?
- Are we only trained to follow the instructions, how can we jump out like the vegetable vendor and go the extra mile to create Value?
