A Product Company Excels at Service

I usually drink water from the tap. Partly because most people in Hollywood movies do and partly because I’m too lazy to boil or filter water. Even when I wrote persuasive advertisements for the world’s largest water purification company, I continued to drink from the tap. However, when a friend refused to visit me with her 9 month old son if I didn’t have ‘Aquaguard’, I got one.

Since then, it has adorned the wall in my kitchen, used by visiting friends and occasionally by the maid who refuses to let me drink from the tap as long as she’s in the house. So I was caught off-guard when a guy called me to say that my Aquaguard was 6 months old and it was time to get it serviced. Could he come now? Within 15 minutes a uniformed service guy was in my kitchen cleaning the water purifier and replacing parts. I was a little wary of what this would cost me. But it was a free service.

Wow!
The company not only provides a free round of servicing and filter replacement, they actually keep a track of when my service is due, remind me about it and all I have to do is open the door! This for a machine that costs less than Rs.6,000. What a contrast to owning a bike that costs 15 times or a car that costs a 100 times that. Forget about being reminided, you actually have to run behind the service center guy, wait your turn, drop your vehicle at the service center and pick it up the next day. And my guess is that there are more Aquaguards installed in the country than cars sold of any brand.

There is nothing really exceptional about what Aquaguard does. It is made exceptional by the lack of such service levels across most other industries. And the processes and infrastructure to provide such service is neither complex nor costly. It is within every company’s reach to do this.

While I write this, there is a huge red-blue truck in the quiet street below my balcony with three men shouting at the top of their voice “Gas, Gas…”. They are checking if anyone needs a Cooking Gas Cylinder.

*Although I admire their service, I do not endorse the product. I’m unconvinced about the benefits of Aquaguard and their claim of “Absolutely Safe Drinking Water”

Making it Easier to Complain

Today, it is almost a cliche that brands want to “listen to customers”. They have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and myriad social media initiatives to supposedly ‘listen’ to customers and make the brand open and communicative. Unfotunately, this is mostly limited and as soon as a customer has a real complaint that needs a real solution, the company suddenly doesn’t feel so communicative any more.

AT&T has launched a nifty iPhone app that could a be model for companies that actually want to listen to their customers and use the complaints and feedback to improve the service. AT&T’s “Mark the Spot” application lets a mobile subscriber complain about dropped calls, low network coverage and bad voice quality. This is a location based app that uses aggregated data from many complaints to find and show areas in the AT&T network where subscribers experience the most problems.

This is a good way to let the customer vent their anger about a dropped signal, feel that AT&T is going to do something about it and at the same time provide AT&T useful information about problems in its network. The information is a collected in a way that is instantly usable rather than generic ‘feedback’ that usually finds it way to ‘nowhere’. This is also removes irritating IVRS systems and call centers from atleast a small part of the customer care function.

The only problem with this approach is that a customer could easily end up feeling that he’s sending complaints into a black hole (which is usually true even while talking to customer care), in the absence of a response or any updates on what happened to his complaint. This is standard psychology, you want a ’sense of progress’, a sense that someone heard you and they’re doing something about your problem. This is what responsiveness means (not just sending a auto-reply email acknowledgement). AT&T should take this forward and when the network problem in a particular area is fixed, it should send a short update to everyone who complained about the particular location.

I like this app particularly because it acknowledges the fact that most customers are not going to report dropped calls and network problems (from location) if it means opening up an email client and writing an email to a generic email address (complaints@att.com). Consumers have become too cynical to expect anything to come out of such an email. It is smart to acknowledge this and make it easier for customers to complain in a way that gives them a sense of ’specificity’ (as against the ‘generality’ inherent in writing to a generic email address or filling a web form).

DESIGN is the new TECHNOLOGY

A presentation I recently gave at the MIT Institute of Design, Pune to the students of their PG course in Design Management.

Clearly Good Experience

Cleartrip has been my favorite travel booking website since its launch. In fact, I’m so happy with the entire experience on the website that I haven’t even tried any other travel site. Last week they did two small things that reaffirmed my faith in their focus on customer experience.

First, they gave me a Rs.500 voucher for being a regular customer. When I saw the email in my inbox, I half expected some convoluted scheme where I could redeem it only if I was booking a flight to Bhubaneshwar or some such rider. And I expected some complicated way of redeeming the voucher with messy codes etc… But their offer was surprisingly simple. No voucher codes, no riders. Just book your next ticket by June 5 using the same account and Rs.500 will be credited to you in a week. No need to copy-paste voucher number or claim rebates etc… Couldn’t have been simpler!

The second thing they did was something I had been thinking of for a while. They added a ‘book a cab’ option once you book your ticket. Makes complete sense, most travellers in cities like Mumbai need to take a cab to the airport. Why not tie this in with booking the ticket and in the process get a little extra revenue? Their share of a customer’s total spend on travel increases and it offers the customer the convenience to book everything related to a trip in a single process.

However, there are some obvious improvements which I hope they’ll make quickly. For one, their rates for a cab are much higher. A ride from my home to the airport in a Meru Cab costs about Rs.225, but their minimum fare is Rs.350 (for within 15 kms) For a difference of Rs.125 I expect a lot of people would rather make a seperate phone call to Meru and book a cab. I haven’t tried the service yet (and probably won’t, I take a Rickshaw which is much cheaper), so I don’t know if they’ve tied up with a cab service. But that would make perfect sense. Just book cabs for an existing service like Meru and get a commision.

Right now, the way it works is: you give them your number, they call you in a while (actually 4 hours) and make your booking (however, its been about 48 hours and they haven’t called me yet!). With their history of creating good experience, I expect they’ll soon move this process online. Just put in your address and when you want to leave. They send this information to a cab service (which is basically what they ask over phone) and you get a SMS confirming the booking and cab driver’s number.

Airtel is India’s Largest Music Company

Business Standard reports that Bharti Airtel has become India’s largest Music company, surpassing Saregama which has revenues of around Rs.150 crore.

Late last year, Bharti Airtel had bagged the ‘Best Mobile Music, TV or Video Service’ award at the GSMA Asia Mobile Award 2008 at Macau. Airtel’s Music-On-Demand was awarded for creating a uniquely intuitive, personalised user experience of music on mobile.      Airtel had bagged the prestigious award among stiff competition from global leaders such as Telstra Corporation, Australia, Geodesic Inc, US, Artificial Life Inc, Hong Kong and Gracenote, US.     

This is really revealing of trends we might see in the future with service companies leveraging their reach and interaction with consumer to sell other services.

Another amazing fact that I recently highlighted in a presentation to a bank’s management: Vodafone is the largest bank in kenya. Yes, it is still a mobile service provider, but its mobile based money transfer service (M-Peso) is the most widely used banking service in a nation where a majority of the population doesn’t have bank accounts (but have mobile phones!)

“Tellable” Service Experiences

I read a very interesting post at workplaceexperience.blogspot.com about creating service experiences that are easily ‘tellable’. An important factor, that is often not considered while designing services and experiences.

“You put in your memory card,” he says, “and it prints thumbnails of all your photos.”
“Uh, OK,” I reply.
“Wait, this is the cool bit. On the printout, there are little boxes next to the thumbnails. You tick the size you need, and put the paper back in the machine. It reads your ticks and prints the pics you want automatically!”

Now that is not just a ‘tellable’ experience, but a very nice use of technology to create a human-centered interface without too much gadgetery.

Read the entire post here.

The Marginal Utility of Choice

More choice is good. Customers feel happy when they have a choice of brands, choice of flavours, choice of serving size, choice of delivery medium… But ‘choice’ has a diminishing marginal utility. After a point, every additional unit of choice decreases in utility or value to the consumer.

For instance, I drink 2 cups of coffee in the morning. This makes me happy. Three cups would be nice once in a while. But, I might not enjoy the fourth cup as much as the third. Or the fifth cup as much as the fourth. So the value or joy I derive from drinking coffee, keeps decreasing after the third cup.]

Similarly, it adds to my service experience if a bank offers 3 different (like, really ‘different’) types of bank accounts or if while booking a flight, I can choose between a veg/non-veg meal and a fruit platter. But sometimes, companies don’t take into account the basic principle of diminishing marginal utility while offering choice.

Kotak Bank offers 7 types of saving accounts, each of them identical to the other, except some minor differences.

To top this, the names of the accounts (Ace, Pro, Nova, Edge, Classic, Easy…) are hardly descriptive of who the account is for, what’s different about it, why should I choose it.

The multitude of accounts aren’t just bad for customer experience. It adds to the complexity of management, service delivery, back-end software and training for customer-facing staff.

Jet Airways allows you to choose from 27 (yes twenty seven!) types of meals including options like non-lactose, low-purine, bland-soft, low-sodium and a ‘Moslem meal’! I’m not even sure how many of these are actually available.

So why is more choice bad? and what is the ‘right amount of choice’?

1. When faced with too many choices, people prefer making no decision rather than a complicated one.
2. Post-purchase regret is more likely if a consumer feels that he could have fared better by making a different choice.
3. Failure to understand or see the difference between the many choices causes the consumer to get confused and feel vulnerable.
4. Creates unnecessary complexity without adding value to the customer experience.

The right amount of choice differs from service to service. But a simple rule of thumb is that an additional unit of choice should cater to the needs of a large enough customer group, should have 60%+ different features or should have a substantially different customer experience.

Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist has written extensively about this and a few years back published a book titled “The Paradox of Choice: why less is more”. Here he gives a talk about how the increase in choices has made us paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

31Volts, a Netherlands based Service Design firm, talks about how a multitude of choice in ’service touchpoints’ is not always a good idea: http://www.31v.nl/2009/03/creating-a-better-service-experience-by-providing-less-choice/

Experience Design for Restaurants

Today, we have an article from our first guest writer, Navin Boricha, Partner at MeriMaaCinema.

A restaurant, is a restaurant, is a restaurant, right? You go there … order some stuff … they serve you … you eat … you go home !!! How different can this get? Yet, for a few years now, a chain has been pushing the envelop on this. Here’s a first hand account of the ‘Crazy Noodles’ experience.

The first thing to hit you on your maiden trip to Crazy Noodles, would be the bright (borderline fluorescent) pink and green interiors. The walls are adorned with rather large pictures of delighted customers, in (increasingly common) black and white. The loud music in the background belongs to the standard ‘pop’ variety – but it does seem to have a skew, which contributes towards making the atmosphere very lively. Graphics on the table tops, inquire: “We hope you have left your table manners at home”.

The menu is (by now predictably) an oddly stretched rectangle. The waiter comes in with a weird plate with what looks like mint, but he squirts some liquid on it from a syringe and seconds later the mints expand into two tissues (unpredictably) ready to use. By now you are already expecting something crazy to happen – and the glasses of water, which come next, once again do the trick. The glasses have rather unconventional spherical bottoms, and rather than sitting on your table, they totter perilously. Eventually even the cutlery used for serving food is unconventionally shaped.

But is this place only gimmicks? What about the core product – the food? Well apart from the predictable twist in naming the dishes, the food is of a consistently good quality, it is priced moderately, served in generous portions and there are some ‘Crazy’ specials on the menu for the adventurously inclined.

The architects of the Crazy Noodles experience could have overdone the ‘crazy’ bit, but they have balanced the fine line between memorability and annoyance. For instance there is nothing crazy about the staff. As is customary in ‘Chinese’ restaurants in our country, the staff is primarily North Eastern. They are polite and genial, and even volunteer to tutor you in using chopsticks if you are in the mood for it.

Search for ‘Crazy Noodles’ on MouthShut.com and you’ll find a young housewife’s laudatory review, actually titled ‘Crazy Kiya Re”. All in all, Crazy Noodles is a fine example of a finely crafted customer experience layer, around the core of a well made and right priced product.

And oh yes, just one more thing … at a pre-appointed time, all the staff suddenly gather in a small group … the track changes to ‘Here comes the Hotstepper’ … and they all break into a well choreographed, small jig.
By now, the sneers of even the most cynical customers had made way for a broad smile :-)

Navin Boricha
navinboricha@gmail.com