The customer delight conundrum

In an increasingly competitive environment, satisfying a customer on the after-sales parameter is as important as selling the product itself. Here's how you can use analytics to strengthen the function

American author and entrepreneur Tony Alessandra famously said, "Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. It is service that wins the game." With unimaginably taut competition across industries, those words have never been truer. Consider how customers of the modern marketplace are empowered through peer advocacy and social media. From product reviews right down to the minutest experience of after-sales, everything is up for public scrutiny. Consequently, companies need to look into customer satisfaction/delight as a key ingredient of their business models. Here, we look at some of the pivotal ways in which customer delight ought to be woven into the fabric of a company's after-sales strategy, not just as a customer satisfaction tool, but also as a retention and advocacy tactic.

Time is money
Rapidly changing customer expectations calls for flexibility in service models. "The window of opportunity to service customers has narrowed with today's busy lifestyles and smaller families, so one can't afford to have service partners who don't agree to offer services as per customer availability," says Shantanu Das Gupta, vice-president- corporate affairs and strategy, South Asia, Whirlpool India. Time is a critical factor for customers and companies have been eyeing ways to expedite service cycles.

For instance, LG India has been traditionally running a '2-1-1' initiative, wherein the customer registers a problem via phone and then the request is transferred to the service centre, which then attempts at fixing an appointment and provide the required services. In order to save time, the company has introduced a '0-1-1' initiative from January this year in 30 cities, where a customer gets the appointment right at the time of registering a complaint.

Similarly, under Godrej Appliances' earlier service model, customers were attended to after the call was registered at the call centre. The service centre would then allocate calls in a way that would ensure maximum productivity for its technicians and would intimate the customer of the time when the technician could visit. But this has changed with its 'Your time, every time' initiative, under which the service centre is required to call each customer, seek an appointment and then visit according to her convenience. It provides 'after office', 'late evening' and 'only on Sunday' services as well.

Other firms have also introduced services like online access, chat facilities, online call status checking, online annual maintenance contract booking etc. Hitachi Home offers the facility of a five-language communication desk at 'Dial-a-care' including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil, with a 24x7, 365 days coverage. To make its service more accessible, Hitachi recently launched a free mobile application where customers can register their service request. To register a grievance, the customer can select the option 'connect to management' and the request could be escalated to the director level.

On its part, Toyota Kirloskar Motor takes its service promise really seriously. At any point in time if the delivery of a car is delayed beyond 60 minutes under the express maintenance service, then Toyota offers 20 per cent special rebate on the labour charges. Tata Sky has a dedicated Twitter handle for customer service that record time of revert and resolution of issues. Companies like Airtel offer a virtual help desk that allows it to virtually deploy IT technicians on demand to support a subscriber experiencing technical issues.

Evidently what Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1988) proposed - that reliability is the most important feature in service quality, the ability to do what you promised to do, when you promised to do it, and how you promised to do it, no exceptions - is still the driving principle here.

The power of social media
Today, social management for corporates includes the whole gamut of online reputation management, consumer engagement and paid media outreach. Take Whirlpool. Once a social media complaint comes to the company's special desk (called SOS), the customer is contacted immediately to understand the reason for the comment. In most cases, these problems are resolved within 24-48 hours.

Airtel's social media strategy is also aimed at connecting with customers for their queries or complaints - all on a real-time basis. For customers, social media has the added advantage of no long waits or queues and a seamless service. Sometimes, companies use hashtags on Twitter with their helpline numbers, offering service support.

At LG India, customer hygiene is one of the most important value propositions. LG technicians wear one-time usable shoe covers and white gloves to maintain hygiene and also to not interfere with product aesthetics while repairing. For 25 per cent of customers (who fall in the premium segment), the company has implemented a '10 Q' initiative. Under this, the company calls the customer from the day of purchase after every tenth day, tenth week and tenth month, checking for product performance. "We don't see service as a cost centre; rather we look at it as an investment," says Vinod Kumar, head, customer services, LG India. To that end, the company has invested in building infrastructure facilities and exclusive service centres in 30 cities.

Now take Maruti Suzuki India which went beyond the call of duty during the Jammu & Kashmir floods last year, by sending over 700 service engineers from across the country to repair vehicles in the region. "To help distressed customers during that period, we also decided to bear 50 per cent of the depreciation amount which is otherwise payable by the customer," says Pankaj Narula, executive director, Maruti Suzuki India.

Is the company listening?
Most white goods makers have introduced a 'happy code' system to gauge customer feedback before the call is closed by technicians. For instance, Godrej and Whirlpool have the 'customer satisfaction' code which also helps gauge the performance of its service engineers and efficiency of service centres. To keep them motivated, engineers who are able to close the calls with the code are given incentives. But engineers may get too pushy with the code. There have been times when Whirlpool withdrew the incentive when there were odd reports of engineers demanding the code, so companies need to tread carefully here.

Now consider the case of Airtel Digital TV. Its 'happy code' initiative was recently improvised to include a TV screen display. Earlier the code was sent on SMS but it created some issues because the person with the registered telephone number might not be available at home. To make it more integrated, Airtel started displaying the code on the TV when the connection started to work. The customer can then close the service request by sharing the happy code with the visiting engineer.

Clarity is key: Harminder Sahni

Expert take

  The disconnect between marketing, sales and after-sales is really wide and is a major source of customer dissatisfaction. The core issue is not the company's intention, but it is the gaps that creep in during the process.

After-sales service is probably the most neglected piece within the customer service value chain or the lifecycle of relationship between a customer and a company. In the case of electronics and services like direct-to-home (DTH), it starts with the delivery of equipment and then installation and later on for upgrade or repairs. By the time the steps for delivery and installation kick in, the sale is already consummated and the customer is tied in by paying the price/fees for services. The best people in the company are focused on sales and the after-sales tasks are either outsourced or are handled by lower level executives.

Companies can focus on delivering excellent after-sales services and, thereby, the elusive customer delight, through the following:

• First, the quality of comm-unication. A clear and consistent line of communication is far better than vague promises that sales people tend to make.
   
• Second, an attempt should be made to address the issue in one call or one visit, that is, offer a single-window solution. Nothing irritates a customer more than being asked to deal with different people for the same problem. It can be really frustrating and causes serious customer dissatisfaction.
   
• Third, a comprehensive, accurate and transparent estimation of the cost of after-sales services could go a long way in reducing the friction between customers and companies. Mostly, it is not the cost but the revision of estimates or appearance of hidden charges like unloading charges for a refrigerator or an extra cable in the case of DTH solutions, that annoys customers. Companies can achieve a much higher level of customer satisfaction if they invest in training their staff in this area.

Harminder Sahni
Managing Director, Wazir Advisors