The Commonwealth Games (CWG) organisers may have set an extreme example where they have only pandered to their own greed and egos, relegating the needs and the expectations of the athletes, spectators and, indeed, the rest of India to irrelevance. However, there are many others in consumer interfacing businesses who talk about their being driven by or, at least, being sensitive to their customers’ needs and expectations, but their attitude and actions give the impression that for them, their customers come last!
Delhi has a new swanky air-terminal now. The media is full of statistics relating to how many billions of dollars it has cost, its gargantuan physical dimensions, the number of travelators and air-craft docking bays etc. etc. Yet, little attention seems to have been paid to the very basic needs of its users — the ease in drop-off and pick-up of passengers, space and amenities for friends and relatives coming to see off or receive the travellers, space on the roads for cars to wait for a few minutes instead of getting hounded off by overzealous traffic policemen whose primary interest seems to be in getting the expensive paid-parking lot full rather than regulating traffic, and adequacy of immigration counters which can efficiently handle the increasingly large number of departing and arriving flights.
Anyone who works in or visits some of the new commercial complexes in Gurgaon, Mumbai, or Bangalore will vouch for the difficulty they face on a day-to-day basis on very basic issues relating to ease of access; parking for the workers and the visitors; adequacy of lifts and banks which can handle peak loads in the morning, at lunch time and then in the evening; and adequate signage to guide the visitors.
Shopping malls, barring a few, show scant respect for the shoppers’ convenience relating to basics such as ease of access, parking, sitting space, information desk, shopper-behaviour and need-based zoning of tenants.
Modern retail stores — small or big — treat all customers as potential shoplifters and most continue to make their customers deposit their shopping bags at the entrance whether it makes any sense or not. Nowhere else in the world does any customer receive such intrusive and irritating treatment from the retailers as she does in India.
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Almost all the modern multiplexes in India have food and beverage (F&B) options. Yes, barring a few, the choice of menu and the combinations on offer are invariably based on a theoretical maximisation of gross margin from the F&B offer rather than working backwards from what the customers may really prefer and then generating the targeted margin from having delighted customers buy more food.
Telecom services operators have obviously never ever heard of “customer relationship management”. There is no special consideration for old, loyal customers or high-value customers. Every customer is subjected to the same menace of receiving unwanted smss and unsolicited phone calls — day and night. And their ingenuity in coming out with incomprehensible “talk plans” is truly remarkable!
A friend working for Indian Railways recently remarked that in his organisation, “boss” is the customer! This may well be the case with most other customer-facing PSUs too, especially Air India.
The list can go on and on. The fundamental problem is that while many companies talk about being customer-driven, very rarely there is any customer-centricity in the very fundamental design of the physical system and in the design of the operating processes. In the very early stages of system design, customer-centricity gets totally overtaken by the desire to optimise financial metrics, be it gross saleable or leasable area, ARPU etc., or egos, e.g., big and bigger stadia or terminals or other physical structures.
Indian consumers are becoming better informed, more confident and assertive, and less tolerant of being taken for granted. Their incomes are also increasing at the same time, and hence they are more willing to pay a slight premium or transfer their loyalty to anyone who can offer them a product or a service which is built around their most fundamental needs and delivered with genuine customer orientation. They will become less forgiving as the years go by and as better alternatives emerge. Indeed, there are extraordinary opportunities for a new generation of entrepreneurs to build mega-businesses just by focusing on the end customer!