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”

TED: Daniel Kahneman on Happiness

Daniel Kahneman at TED

One of the world’s most respected psychologist and winner of a Nobel Prize for Behavioural Economics, Daniel Kahneman talks about:

1. Why “Happiness” is a redundandant concept and needs to be replaced with other words that fully describe the myriad experiences that we currently put under the happiness umbrella
2. The difference between “experiences” and “memories of experiences”
3. And how this difference influences our choices on everything from the surgeon we choose for a major surgery to a vacation.

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).

Treasure Hunt: Find the Drop-box

There hasn’t been much publicity about it, but HDFC Bank has launched a new innovative game at select branches to make the customer experience more lively and fun. Aptly called ‘Treasure Hunt: Find the Drop-box’, the business objective is to increase the time customers spend at a branch, maximize interaction with as many different staffers as possible and to give customers a tour of the entire branch.

When a customer walks into the branch and goes to the teller to deposit a cheque, he is given a cryptic answer and sent to fill the deposit slip. Once filled, he is given clues to find the drop-box. This leads him to different areas of the branch and creates oppotunities for interaction with more bank employees in his quest to find the drop-box. Finally, he finds it hidden behind a desk on the first floor, reaching there only after crossing the deadly dungeon (narrow spiral staircase).

Ok, so its not a game. Just another example of how customer experience doesn’t figure in most descisions at service companies. But this is taking it too far! You don’t need a service designer to tell you that something as commonly used as a cheque drop-box should be in an open area, preferably close to the entrance and definitely with signage.

But then again, may be you do!

At Guts, we do a ‘Service Audit’ to pin-point these kind of situations. The Service Audit involves experiencing a company’s service through all possible touch-points and in every possible situation. This really helps find the pain areas in the company’s service delivery and a customer’s experience. In many instances (like the one described above), operational expediency overrides any consideration for customer experience. Setting this right is not difficult or expensive once you look at it through a ’service design’ lens.

Customer Satisfaction is a Moving Target

Nine out of ten respondents to an Accenture survey report having left atleast one service provider in the last year due to poor service.

Accenture recently released its fourth Customer Satisfaction survey with a special report on ‘Customer-centricity’ in India. It has some revealing findings about what Indian customers care about, about their loyalty to service providers, what they do when they have a problem… Here are some highlights:

90% of the respondents have left atleast one service provider due to poor service
Wow! 90% is a lot. Globally, the figure is 67%. The higher India figure is aided by greater choice and fewer entry-exit hurdles. 15 years back you had to wait for 3 months to get a telephone connection. Today, you can get 5 mobile connections in about 2 hours. This shift in power from the ’supply side’ to the ’demand side’ is something that a lot of companies (both private and government services) are yet to come to terms with.

Banks, Internet services and mobile operators were switched most commonly
This is very obvious. Services that have become ‘commodities’ are the ones that will have the least customer loyalty and will be the easiest to switch. With number portability on the cards, mobile operators will see and even greater outgo of customers swayed by marketing messages and promotions. Incidentally, these three services are also the ones where the margins and profitability are constantly under pressure. When a service doesn’t offer anything unique, it is impossible to be consistently profitable in a buyers market.

45% respondents switch service providers because of a better price, 71% because of poor experience
Yes, Indians are price-concious. But they aren’t pound foolish, penny-wise. Increasingly, if a customer is generally happy with a service, he is less likely to go price shopping or change services for a small price differential. People have less time which they want to spend with their families and doing things that interest them. But if you make their lives difficult, they’ll walk.

52% respondents believe their expectations are never or rarely met
Are the expectations too high or are the services just out of tune with customers really want. A little of both. Companies will at some point have to say ‘itne paise mein itnaich milega’. But before that, they needs to spend time understanding how customers use their services and create service models that address these needs. There is little focus on designing services and experience in India right now.

Talk to me!
85% customers call a helpline for assitance, 68% send an email, 47% visit a website and only 31% visit a physical location

While this survey is revealing, it must be taken with a pinch of salt. One, it is limited in size. The number of respondents is around 300. Two, most respondents are reffering to customer service, not ’service experience’. But, customer service comes into picture when there is a flaw in the service model. Three, this survey probably represents a very narrow class of Indian consumers. I don’t think it is really reflective of what a rural mobile customer thinks or how he acts.

Download the India Report here or go to the Accenture website to download the global report.

Customer Service / Customer Experience

In the last week since I started writing this blog, a few readers have shared their ‘bad experiences’ with services. More often than not, these have been bad experiences with ‘customer service’ as opposed to bad ‘customer experience’. There is a big difference. But in the absence of any noticable ‘customer experience’, most customers perceive their experience with the helpline or customer service desk of a company to be the ‘customer experience’.

Customer experience is what a customer feels about any interaction (and all interactions as a whole) with a brand/service before, during and after he buys the service. Customer Service is a much smaller sub-interaction, usually when there is a problem.

The fact is that customers are the most sensitive to how they are treated when they go to the company with a problem. This makes customer service the acid test of customer experience. If a company has an ordinary customer experience, but very helpful customer service, it will still endear itself to the customer.

Customer experience on the other hand is about how useful the customer finds your service, whether he perceives it as ‘value for money, how easy it is for him to learn to use it, if his experience with your employees is uniformly good… and other tangible and intagible attributes that constitute your service.

In a sense, customer service is a commodity, a hygiene factor. Customer experience is what differentiates your service and creates loyalty in the long run.