Uber - throwing the Service Provider Away with the ....

I have been reading a lot of reactions on the banning of Uber in New Delhi after the unfortunate happening. I would agree that there would have been fault at Uber's end in verifying the Driver but does that mean that we will ban the service.

Let us come to the basic issue , why is suddenly that one finds these app based services becoming popular across cities in the country, first is the poor state in which our urban transport infrastructure is in. Second, is that the other formats of public transport like Auto or Cabs are very expensive and one has to rely on the whims and fancies of the drivers to reach your destination,. Anyone who has travelled in a Auto in Chennai or Bangalore will testify for that.

I was reading an article in the TOI in which the author lamented the fact that the incident had snatched away the sense of security which women use to have when one travelled through these app based services.

In terms of the verification process, we all know that how difficult it is to get a genuine verification from a authorities and the other way round too...

I think the solution does not lie is just banning these services but to reflect back on what processes can we have in place where the verification processes are more reliable and of course the overall safety levels improve....

On to the next orbit in Customer service

On many occasions I have used this blog to vent out my frustration on the poor quality of service which we get.  It is a very sensitive issue and if I touch this issuer in a class it would ensure that for next 10-15 minutes everyone is sharing his/her service horror stories.

I would try to justify telling them that marketing is new in India, categories are unsaturated and so on... And sort of conclude that things will improve as time goes by,

And yes in the last few years the customer service levels have improved, but this improvement has not come from the traditional older firms, but it is the ecom firms which are setting up the new benchmark.  

The best experience is from firms like Amazon which has a stated aim of becoming the world's most consumer friendly company.  And for the first time other firms in India want to follow the international standards, so our own flipkart and myntra also provide the same exceptional customer support services.

I think historically companies have competed to reach the bottom rung in delivering customer service, and this would apply to both domestic as well as multinational firms. With the MNCs I guess when they start-off they do set high standards and then over time decide to compromise or match the lowest denominator in the industry. 

But with the consumer getting a chance to experience best-in-the-class service he/she will demand the same from the traditional older firms and they will have to respond if they have to compete and survive

Technology Vs the Cab Driver

I just thought of sharing my recent experience of hiring a Meru Cab and the issues of technology versus human interface. As with many other experiences which I have shared earlier, this also is not one the best experiences which I have had, but...

To start with the positives of the experience, I was using the same number from which I had booked the cab earlier so I was immediately addressed as Rajesh, and asked where I want the pick-up from. I had used the service from two different locations, and once I told the location, the other details were not asked for, as it was already there in the system. The messages on the mobile followed and the cab also arrived 20 mins prior to the pick-up time. So all was fine...

Now comes the driver, during most part of journey he was busy on his mobile phone talking to some one and when he was not on the mobile, he was over speeding with the system shouting that you are exceeding the speed limit – “Please Slow Down”. This must have happened atleast 20 times during the 40 km journey. Then at the end he was very reluctant in giving the change back as if he had earned an extra tip for the experience he had provided. 

Not that I have had not had worse experiences with drivers earlier, being from Bangalore and traveled in the city auto rickshaws (only Chennai auto guys are worse). But then for me the advantage which technology had given was lost by the human interface, this was what set me thinking about how important it is to sensitize and train the human element in the chain.

Online Shopping - Over promise and underdeliver!!!!!

Some say we are at the inflexion point with regard to online shopping in India. People like Kishore Biyani of Pantaloon retail are betting big on the sector with a target of 1000 crore from their recently started online venture.

I personally am a great believer in the power of Internet the impact it has had and will have on shopping (overall marketing) , and I personally have shifted most of my book buying to Internet. But the test of these things when there is a glitch in their operations, system or rather the faith in it gets tested when there is a problem......

I will share the recent experience which I had with flipkart.com, while buying books. I have been buying on the site for last one year, and the service has been very good. They have sent the books at the promised time and I have recommended the site to a few of my friends who are also happy with the site.

Then last Saturday night I wanted to buy a few more books, and did my usual net banking transaction only to find that the money was transferred from my account but the flipkart site said payment not received. I knew that these kind of glitches do happen and so I checked their site where they had given a helpline number saying you could call it 24X7 on any day of the week. So i called on the number and , was put on hold saying the operator would attend, and then no response.... I tried a couple of times and then mailed their customer care, there at least I got a email after a few hrs saying they are looking into the issue and would get back to me in 24 hrs , and ...no response. I ultimately after more than 48 hrs I tried calling the number again and this time (being Monday) some one responded and was able to get the issue sorted out. Hopefully will be getting the books in a few days.

Looking back I was trying to understand why was I getting frustrated by the experience as the issue was sorted out in less than 48 hrs, which could be considered a very good response time, from what we have been used to till now, but then the problem is because of the promises which the vendor was making , a 24 hr helpline (paid, not a toll-free!) which does not work on a Saturday and the customer support saying that it will respond in 24 hrs or less and then you are the one who has to again call up and get a response. Do not promise something which you cannot deliver- if we look many other helplines, they mention the timing 9am-5pm on weekday and we do not expect them to respond to my phone call on a Sunday....

I hope to listen more from reader on their experiences and opinions on online shopping

Jet Airways Strike Customers pay the price...

Was just watching the press conference on time now, where the Jet Airways management addressed the press on the strike crisis and thought should write about it...

Just to give a brief idea about the impact the current strike is having on airline passengers - Jet Airways is the largest airline in the country, with 26.3% market share. This means almost one out of four airline travellers would be impacted by the strike, in absolute a total of around 35,000 air travellers (both domestic and international) would be adversely impacted. Though close to a quarter of them have either been accommodated in other airlines or the flights still being operated by Jet, but all of them would have go through the harrowing experience of not being sure if their flight would take off or not.....

And for passengers whose flights have got cancelled, the impact would be much worse. Reliability and timeliness would be a top priority for travellers by air. And when one fails on the core promise to it's customers we are looking at very serious long term implications for the brand. A look at the awards and recognitions which Jet Airways has got in the last year shows that the airline has been doing well...

The management while assuring the customers told that the Jet airways website will be the centre of managing the crisis by acting as a main source of information for customers on the flight status, but a visit to the website does not give that impression, apart from a small link to check the flight status there is not much information the in the site. An opportunity lost to leverage the website ??

Overall, it is said about the word 'crisis' in Chinese is composed of two words one meaning danger and other meaning opportunity (though latest entry in wikipideia disputes that ), is very appropriate here. Many companies have gone through such crisis and have come out stronger by showing that they have the customer interest at the centre of their operations, experiences of jet blue and others show that , but will Jet Airways be able to do the same??

Negative fall-outs of technology

I think most if us have a difficulty in appreciating, both negative as well as positive sides of a given situation, if we are positive then it will be all positive and the same other way...

I realised this yesterday when I was talking to group of senior Bank officials of a reputed bank. They were lamenting the fact that though there are many benefits from technology like core-banking and computerisation and the customer has gained enormous amount of convenience because of the advent of ATMs and net banking , this according to them is happening at a cost. The cost is the loss of one-to-one interaction with the customer. To quote what one of the senior managers said "Today a customer can close an account at the click of a button and I might come to know about it much later". In the earlier days, if the customer wanted to close the account he would have come to the branch and spend time , and thus providing a opportunity for the banker to retain the customer. And maybe in a situation of close personal interaction chances of one identifying and solving a problem at much ealier stage is much easier.

This is not the first time that I hearing such a fear being expressed, this was also said by senior railway officials about the increasing acceptance of Internet based ticketing.

This concern is mainly from the organization's end , which fears that technology might over a period of time convert their customers into mere numbers, but on the other end many customers are becoming uneasy with this lack of human interaction. Maybe this is one the reasons why many erstwhile pure-play companies like makemytrip.com and shaadi.com are coming up with physical offices and interaction point where one can go a actually talk to a person....

Difficulty with service delivery

I have written earlier on the kind of service we are used to getting in India, and the saga sort of continues. One can listen to frequent horror stories of how a customer gets treated in Shopper's Stop when he wants to exchange a shoe which he bought a couple of days back. The typical service levels at our banks are again not something which one would actually want to talk about, and obviously it is not just the public sector ones which excel at that.

In this context I would like to relate a service experience albiet a positive one for a change. This happened with one of my friends when he went to get his car serviced. He went for his regular service and was not happy with the service gave his feedback to the company complaining about the tardy service which he got without expecting much to happen, but to his surprise within a matter of a few days he had people from the company, the dealer rushing to him with apologies and gifts. At the end he was more surprised than happy with the experience and was wondering what had happened to our service standards, have they really changed...

Though we tend to acknowledge the fact that because services are people driven there would be a lot of variation in the levels of service being delivered, but one has to experience that to realise how critical it can be as happened with us in our recent trip to uttranchal. We spend close to eighth days across four rest houses of KMVN ( a government tourist facility) and found the behaviour and how helpful the front desk people where at the place made a lot of difference to your overall experience at that destination and you also come up the conclusion that some people are stuck with a job (service job) which they should have never come to in the first place...............

Fallen Tree & Implications for Marketers

We had a lot of wind and rain a couple of days back, called "Andhi" in this part of the country and as with every year there were trees uprooted and other damage ... In the park in front of my house there was a reasonably big tree which also fell during this and i observed the tree only after it fell, before that though it was there I had never observed it. Though it might seem strange but this kind of oversight or not seeing something which is there happens quite often, and the marketers also tend to suffer because of that, though this happens more in the case of services than products.

How many of us notice when the service in a restaurant is good, we take it for granted that it has to be that way, ...basic services like power which runs the computers and AC in my room, mobile services, the list goes on ... and a customer also develops a blind spot over time for any additional service or a new feature , over a very short period of time the new service or a feature is accepted as normal and if you want to surprise the customer you have to think about something new...

Life for a marketer is becoming more and more tough..

Customer Loyalty Schemes

Walk into any retailer and you would find them trying to sell loyalty cards, whether it is 'Club West' from Westside or the 'Green Card' of Pantaloons, or 'First Citizen' from Shoppers Stop or Landmark's Fellowship Card...... the list is a long one even without getting into the offers made by service industry, be it airlines, or clubs...

The idea behind these loyalty cards is that you are able to retain your customers and make them buy more and more from your shop and so on ............

But does this happen in reality...

I doubt, and most of us in India would agree based on our experiences especially with the new organized retailers,

I will relate my personal experince ........

I buy books at Landmark and last year was given a landmark fellowship card, and was promised many things.... so as a loyal customer kept clocking my loyalty points on the card and as I would buy many books, the people there also agreed to give a small additional discount over and above the points on the loyalty card....

Then suddenly one day I am told that the loyalty programme has changed or rather improved and there would be a new card issued to me. I asked whether the earlier schemes were still on, the answer at the desk was no no... they have been improved.

But then when I went to the counter with my books, the response was that if you take your regular discount (very small amount) you will not be able to get your points added to the loyalty card, and when asked why, he says orders from top.....

About details of the advantages of new schemes some lame explanation that additional points for a purchase of certain quantity and so on....

I felt that the company could have communicated to me in detail , they have my personal email id and they do send communication on certain events which happen but ....... the feeling that the company was designing new schemes to prevent a regular customer from getting any additional benefit..

Now some of you might feel that I am asking for more, but If I were to go to my regular book shop (old shop) and buy books from him , he would gladly give me three times the discount Landmark gives me, but then at times variety and new arrivals are better at landmark....

My point is that now when I walk into Landmark I am dissatisfied customer because of their botched up loyalty programme...waiting for Crosswords to come to town or start ordering books from the old book shop.....

Loyalty programmes can work as double edged sword for a marketer, if used wisely can result in customer retention, otherwise would make an otherwise loyal customer into a dissatisfied one...

Marketing and Service Linkage....

In theory one reads a lot about how post-sales service is a critical component of customer retention and building a reputation in the marketplace. but in practice we have to look really hard to find instances wherein companies exhibit such behavior towards their customers.

In his latest post Seth Godin writes about his experince with a service provider who ended up not finishing the job propoerly, which spoiled an overall good experince.In India we face such situations day in and day out . The problem with our distribution and retail networks is that they have been designed to handle one way traffic, focusing on making a sale, and they are not willing to even consider a situation wherein the company might also have to take back goods or help consumers out in situations like the one in which my friend was stuck a few days back. He had lost his mobile phone and wanted to get the number blocked and a duplicate SIM card issued. The service provider is one the biggest in the country with a very good market presence whom I would not like to name.

My friend had to run around the city to get the things done, a trip to the nearest police station, then visiting 5-6 of the vendors, who only gave him some numbers to contact , where obviously there was no one to respond to his queries. The executives at the vendor and franchisees were least interested in helping as it had nothing to do with additional revenue coming or selling a new SIM card which would helped them in their targets .

The experince would have been totally different had the person visited the outlets to purchase a new connection, he would have been pampered and treated like a king, but the same person is disowned when he has a problem. The problem is both at the level of attitude as well as systemic, with the kind of growth we are witnessing in the mobile services no one is bothered about a old customer with a problem with so many new customers wanting connections... and I doubt if there would be any set procedures on how to handle such a situation.

But in the process the customers who go thru the expeirnce end up carrying a very negative impression about the company and would probably wait till number portability starts in India...

Is Customer the king in India,Yet?

This is a question which I have raised in this blog quite a few times and whenever I have written about my experiences or rather bad experiences as a customer i have had quite a few people commenting on it.Which essentially reinforces the fact that most of as consumers have faced similar situations and thus are able to relate to it. Any of us who has stayed for a reasonably long time in US has more discomfort with the way we are treated here. Our experiences in banks, both nationalized as well as private is equally bad though one would expect the experiences in the private banks to be better. Dealing with service-guarantee on products is still a painful process, and so is dealing with salespeople in various shops . The list seems to be endless...............

Maybe one can console himself by saying that things would change and we are wrong in comparing ourself with economies which have been customer-oriented for a much longer time than what we have been, one could say that we have become consumer-oriented since the liberalization of the our economy in the 1990's, so as such we are a very young customer-focused country. This is an important point because putting the customer first and making him the king or queen will not happen automatically , once you put it in the mission statement of the company. Because this care and focus on the needs of the consumers would come only through the behavior and attitude of not just the marketing department and but also the other departments which have an active interface with the consumer. The term used for this effort is "Internal Marketing", which essentially means you need to start the marketing process within the company starting from the Marketing Department itself and then covering other departments. How many times have we interacted with either the lady at the reception of a company or a sales person in a multi-brand outlet and carried a bad impression about the company itself?????

Internal Marketing would require companies to hire right kind of people and train them well enough, and ensure that you communicate your philosophy through the company right from the top management to the distributor sales person.

Things would start to change when the employees of a company get treated well when they themselves go out as customers ... and start to accept the fact that they have to treat customers well, and this is a long term process and hopefully we are moving towards it......

Train Travel and Indian Railways

Most of us have pleasant memories of train travel. We associate train travel with vacations and holidaying. My earliest memories of train travel use to the three day- two night journey from one corner of the country to the other for our summer holidays and thus so far in my life i continue to love train journey and longer the better. The last week from UP to Gujarat , just over a thousand kilometer distance and had booked my tickets through eticketing services provided by the railways.

My onward journey was booked in AC 3 tier and the train was late only by 4 hours and managed get into my berth, only to find that there was one more person claiming my berth. The train was late and I was feeling sleepy, but still managed to hold on till the TT came and sorted out the issue. The problem seems to be with more one person, so I started wondering if there has been a major goof up in the railway reservation system itself. But we were in for a pleasant surprise, the TT came and informed us that I had been upgraded to AC 2 tier and the person claiming my berth had been upgraded from Sleeper. Same had been done for quite a few people. Most of the travelers in the 2 AC were people who had been upgraded and i could hear them speak to their friends on mobile.

The benefit to Railways would be that they would have managed to clear up some of the wait listed travelers into sleeper and made some more money. But over and above it is the positive word of mouth which would have spread among people. Through this they have managed to create a positive image for railways which they might encash it at some point later in time.

Well the story doesn't end here, I had booked my return ticket back on the same train a few days later and I was expecting another upgrade. I was not being greedy , but this being the off- season the AC 2 is usually empty, but I was disappointed to find that it had not happened. Out of curiosity I went around the AC 2 tier compartment to find it almost empty. So what had actually happened with on my onward journey was possible on the return journey but obviously some initiative had to be taken from some ones end to do the up gradation... so it make me wounder about the problem with execution of good schemes and being more customer responsive

5 Minutes at a Check-out Counter- Lessons for Marketers

Today I went to one of the hypermarts in the city and was impressed by the variety and display of products. After spending close to an hour, I picked up a few essentials and came down to the check-out counter. There were more than a dozen of them and I searched the one which had the smallest queue, infact had only person ahead of me and waited my turn. The person in front of me had a few items that he had purchased, and one of which was a Minute Maid Juice, newly introduced by coca cola in India. The girl at the check out counter told the person this is a new item, just come so you will have to go to another counter where they were making manual bills and get it billed. Hearing this I quietly dropped the Minute Maid which I though I would try. This was for all the display and posters that company had put up in the shop and all the hoarding in the city, the company people would feel great that they had put up a good display and dumped the shop with stocks but.....

Well the story doesn’t end here, I had only two items and after billing I gave my card and I was shown a sign according to which I hadn’t billed enough to be eligible for a card swipe, I tried complaining that the other shop where I purchase accepts cards irrespective of the amount but .... in the meanwhile the minute maid customer came back after checking his bill and told the girl that she had billed a 20/- item which was supposed to be given free. The girl started arguing that the people on the floor run schemes which are not told and this is not there in the system and so on . As a solution she told him to pick up some thing else for 20/-. The customer was not impressed he said he wanted the money back and the girl called her supervisor, who again didn’t have any idea. Knowing that all this wouldn’t be ending soon I thought it best to pay cash and move on. Even after another ten minutes I could see that they were not bale to address the problems with the earlier customer

This experience brings into focus a few essential things, first is the training of personnel who deal with customers, which is these rapidly expanding stores should look into and second in a hypermart a consumer is supposed to purchase huge quantities, now if he is worried about what schemes displayed on the shop floor is he actually getting in peak hours would mean long queue and more frustration for people following behind...

And last point back to Minuet Maid it is not enough for a marketer to ensure that the product is available, the POPs and danglers are in place, the ads are running he has also got to ensure that the products get entered into the systems of various stores to ensure customer convenience at the purchase point...

Handling Product recall - The Toyota Way

This happened in the very first year of introduction of Lexus in the US market. I will quote from the book "The Marketing Mavens" by Noel Capon.

"We had a couple of quality issues. So we were tested pretty quickly as to how we were going to deal with warranty and recalls. We went beyond what any other car manufacturer and dealer had ever done, and we set a new benchmark. We took back every car. In some cases we went to the customer's home. We checked the whole car and gave the car back, we washed it and filled the tank. Minor things, maybe. But they blew people away, and they motivated tremendous word of mouth. Lexus owners were boasting about us and our service to their friends, 'You know, they just don't talk about standing up for their product- they actually back up their comments.'"

-Steve Strum, Toyota's Vice President Marketing

No wonder Lexus went on to become the best selling luxury car in the US, selling 2.7 times all the three models of Merc together. Lexus has been topping the JD power ranking for years.

Product Recall and Customer Problems

Product Recalls have been in news for the last few days. The news that Nokia is replacing 46 Million batteries has pulled down the stock price of Nokia. Similar recall of toys from Mattel has also been creating news, especially as it is related to high content of lead and magnets in toys. Mattel has put on it's website voluntary safety recall facts in trying to show it's responsiveness to consumers. Companies have denied that It would have much influence on the image of the brand in the eyes of the consumers, but experince tells us that product recalls do have an adverse impact on the standing of the brand in the eyes of the consumers.

The problems mainly is with the trade and the channel partners who would be involved in the recall process. The channels are designed for pushing products out and not for taking them back from customers and there is resistance from the trade to get involved in the process atleast in the Indian context. This is despite the incentives provided for the recall.

I remember two cases of product recall where the customer experince was not good. In 1996-7 there was a problem with steering component of Maruti800 and the company offered to replace it free of cost to the customers provided they came to the dealer where they had purchased the car. Though might look very logical and simple but the fact was that we stayed a good 500 kms from the nearest dealer made the ordeal quite painful. The second experince was with that of pens, though one the face of it replacing a pen (Parker) should have been easier, but the hassles involved with the retailer and the company's attitude left a bitter taste in the customer mouth. The company was Luxar Writing Instruments.the Indian parnter of Parker.


Infact, I feel that the problem of recall if handled carefully can become one more opportunity to reinforce the image of the company as being a customer-oriented . A touch-point which if handled properly can lead to more long-term relationship with the customers...

Customer Feedback

A few days back I purchased a sandwich maker from one of the leading brands of electrical appliance makers in the country. The product had a two year warranty and my earlier experience with the brand had been good so readily gave the premium for the brand. After the very first use the lights which indicate whether the sandwich is ready stopped working!!!!!!!!!!!!! I took it back to the dealer and he sent it for repair. I got it back in a couple of days with the problem sorted out. But thing which struck me was I was treated as any customer who would have any repair problems with his product within the two year time period of the product, the fact that I was more frustrated because it was a new product was not getting reflected anywhere and I doubt if the information ever got captured at the company's end. Maybe they would have noted the purchase date at the service centre but is that information being passed on to the manufacturing people in the company is doubtful. The damage to the brand is more when the customer experiences problems with the new product.

In his book ‘Pour You Heart into it- How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time’, the CEO & Chairman of Starbucks Howard Schultz cites many instances wherein the customer comments written in the feedback form were used to improve service and introduce new products. The importance to the comments given by the customers can be seen from the fact that Howard himself would read many of the comments personally. When would we have our Desi companies reach that level of customer responsiveness?