Things that matter even after you’ve got everything right
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| Rajaram Rajendran |
As old fashioned as this may sound, there’s one part in your business that can mess up your entire marketing plan, and your brand image, if neglected.
Good customer service, as Seth rightly said, really is the cheapest form of advertising.
There was this time where you make a product, advertise like crazy, and people used to buy. Makers used to yell at the top of their lungs, “Our product is the best, come buy, people.” And yes, the theory was that if people were bombarded enough with advertising, eventually it will pay off and you will see the sales curve going up.
Not any more.
In the good old times, the channel of communication was only top-down, and one way, where the brand talked to the consumers, and that was enough. Today, the horizontal level of communication, consumer to consumer, is much more than brand to consumer. Forums and discussions and social media and blogs will talk about lousy products, and even worse, lousy advertising.
Let us analyse this with a real-life example.
Motorola made a great product, called the Motorola Milestone Android phone. Good advertising, and the product convinced me to buy it over HTC or Samsung products of a similar nature. Win for Motorola? Yes. I also converted some of my friends to use Android based phones, as a side-effect of my purchase, and some of them went with Motorola products too. All in all, a very common thing that happens in today’s connected, beautiful world. Also, I bought the product from Tata Croma at the Mumbai Airport. Which people go to after check-in, and while they wait for their flight. I was travelling from Mumbai to Bengaluru. I live in Bengaluru.
After five months, my phone’s touchscreen started acting weird. Motorola India have a customer service number. Great! I call them. They give me the address of their ‘authorised service centre’. I take my phone there. It turns out that this is also the authorised service centre for a lot of other mobile phone brands. This is also the place you should go to, if you need to learn how a place can be run with absolutely no system in place, and how to test human beings’ patience. There is one receptionist, who handles everything. I mean, everything. The result? They process around one complaint per hour. Remember that taking in your phone, writing you a slip, entering your contact details and saying “We will call you and let you know what the problem is,” can be done in 10 minutes, if the system is more efficient. If you take your phone there for service, your average waiting time is 1.5 - 2 hours. Worse, if you go there to collect your phone when it’s ready, they make you wait for at least 30 minutes. (To go to the shelf, match a 4-digit number and take the phone out. Seriously!)
Now I needed a soft copy of my bill, and I called Croma. The Croma in Mumbai Airport had only a mobile number, to my surprise. And it was off whenever I tried. I called Croma customer care. I gave them my date of purchase, time of purchase, product name and number, and every other detail. One person told me I needed to collect the bill copy from the store. I told him the store is inside the airport in Mumbai, and I live in Bengaluru. He told me the same thing. I asked him which was a bigger effort, him going to the computer, entering the details of purchase and e-mailing me a copy of the bill, or me flying to Mumbai, getting a return flight, check in and go to the store to get a bill copy?
It took me 2 weeks of calling to get a simple soft copy of a bill, from a nation-wide electronic retail chain.
So the service centre manages to replace my touchscreen, and within five minutes of getting my phone back, I had to climb up the stairs again, and give it back to them, because the battery had stopped working. Another five days later, they called me saying the phone was ready. I went, waited, collected my phone. Seemed to be working. When I got the first call, I realised that these guys hadn’t placed the sensors right, so my display never turned back on whenever I got a call. Back to the place again. To cut this short, I made 6 trips to the service centre altogether, every time they fixed something, something else went wrong. All within 6 months of the purchase of an expensive phone. It still doesn’t work perfect, but I gave up because I couldn’t waste any more time.
To top this, Motorola doesn’t release OS upgrades on time, whereas other people who bought cheaper phones from other brands like HTC, got timely OS updates. And those phones now run newer versions of the OS than my Moto’s high end phone.
Now, this is not exactly Motorola’s fault, or is it? The product is well designed, the advertising was good, the pricing was competitive, offers were timely, all done, and I might still, never buy a Motorola again. And I know other people who say the same. But in the overall number game, these unsatisfied customers will be a small percentage, and the companies can continue to ignore. But someday soon, people are going to get fed up, this will begin to count, and a company with a culture into which good customer service is built, will take the most advantage of it.
I’m writing this from a friend’s place, who had bought a Motorola Android phone after he saw mine, and now his phone shuts down every 20 minutes or so. Would I really recommend Motorola ‘authorised’ service centres to him? Or would I just suggest him another brand? Good question.
Use this situation to your advantage. There really aren’t many companies that excel at customer service. Build it into your company. Let it be a part of your culture. Let yourself be known for that, along with your other qualities. And you shall succeed in not only getting customers, but retaining them as well. Customer loyalty is an asset, and a great one at that. All the best.
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The writer is an entrepreneur, designer, digital artist, wannabe musician and a jack of all, who thinks black & white photography is very cool.
To write to the author, please send an email to dare@cybermedia.co.in with the subject line 'Rajaram Rajendran'.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are that of the author and do not represent the magazine's.
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