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.

CASE STUDY: Influencing ATM Usage through Service Design

Today, we are proud to publish our first Service Design Case Study :-)

The Reserve Bank of India recently mandated that bank customers can use any ATM (not just their own bank’s) without any additional fee from April 1, 2009. Earlier, a bank would charge a customer anywhere between Rs.15 to Rs.50 for the use of ATMs belonging to other banks. This fee acted as a disincentive for customers to use the ATMs of other banks. In absence of this, customers will freely use any ATM.

When Bank A’s customer uses Bank B’s ATM, Bank B charges Bank A a usage fee of Rs.17-20. This was passed on to customers. Now that the bank cannot pass on this fee to the customer, it has to bear this cost for every transaction that its customers use another bank’s ATM for. A Bank with a small ATM network will be saddled with huge costs as customers start using the ATMs (of other banks) that are closer or more conveniently located.

“Influencing ATM Usage through Service Design” outlines how a bank can design its service to minimize the use of ATMs belonging to other banks by its customers. We analyze the different scenarios in which customers would use the ATMs of other banks and create a service model to deal with each scenario. We also studied the usage patterns and pain areas for customers in the current system to devise a new service that allows customers to record, track and account for cash expenditure, which otherwise appears as a single-line “ATM Withdrawal” entry in the bank statement, without providing any details of how the withdrawn cash was used.

Download a PDF of the Case Study here. (824 kb)

We would love to have your comments and suggestions on the process, content and presentation of this case study. Please comment here or write to abhi@gutse.in

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!)

SPOON not required. Best eaten the old-fashioned way

There are innumerable examples of services that have become a pain because of poorly thought-through implementation of fancy technology solutions for problems that would have been much better addressed by simple old-fashioned solutions.

The food court at Oberoi Mall (Goregaon, Mumbai) provides a glaring case study. It has a dozen+ outlets spread across an area of around of 4000 sqm. But none of the them accept payments. A diner has to calculate how much the family’s order will cost, go to a seperate counter, buy a ‘Spoon Card’, add balance to the card equivalant to the estimated bill and return with the card to food outlet to place an order.

I asked around and found that they moved to this system recently because the food outlets had a shortage of change and it was becoming difficult for each outlet to manage cash.

Oh great! So to make it easier for the people who man the food outlets, they make the customer’s life difficult. To do away with a billing system and save the hassle of keeping change, they came up with the brilliant idea of centralized billing. Only, they did not think about how this impacts the customer experience.

Service Map of a Customer’s Experience at the Spoon Food Court

Click here to see how this centralized billing stystem impacts the customer experience. It adds 8 steps and 30 minutes to a simple transaction of ordering food.   

This is not only terrible from a customer experience point of view, but is also a messy and inefficient service delivery process and a bad retail strategy.

1. Waste of Space: They’ve wasted valuable retail space creating a seperate counter for issuing the Spoon card.
2. Complex and Expensive Technology: The Issuing card counter has 2 POS terminals which are used to charge a Spoon card with the value that a customer required. Every food outlet has a POS terminal to swipe the card, take-off the value of the bill from the card and punch in the order. All of these would be networked and would require a software platform for clearing every transaction.
3. Discourages Impulse purchase: What if I’ve gone through the entire process of getting a Spoon card and just before I place the order, I also feel like ordering a lassi? The entire process is so cumbersome that I’d rather not have the lassi (which means it would be really really cumbersome!)
4. Prevents small orders: What if I’m just passing by and want to have a coke before I head to the gaming zone next door? Will I go through the entire process of standing in a line and acquiring a Spoon card to get a coke? No chance. This prevents customers with small 1-2 item orders from coming to the food zone.  
5. Creates huge lines and chaos: 2 cash counters to serve customers from a dozen+ food outlets. Is this a joke? A Subway that I frequent at another mall has 2 cash counters within it and still makes me wait to pay. How do they expect to provide customer speedy billing and payments with such inadequate capacity? Lines longer than 5 people turn people off and make them reconsider making the purchase.

All this just because its difficult to manage billing and keep change? (something that is such an integral part of any retail business). And if that was a genuine problem, there are other, simpler ways to solve it. If keeping change is a problem, the food outlets could address it by:

• Keeping the pricing change-friendly. Just price everything in multiples of 5 or 10 (50, 90, 120 or even 55, 95, 15). This reduces the denominations of change you need to just 4 (100s, 50s, 10s and may be 5s)
• Get Change. Get together and employ a person whose sole job is to make sure every food outlet has change. Every morning he’ll go to a bank and get change worth a fixed amount and distribute it among the outlets. He also makes sure that during the day every outlet has a healthy inventory of change. At a monthly salary of Rs.6,000 this would be about fifty times cheaper than the complex system in place right now.

“We are surrounded by engineers’ folly: too many technical solutions still looking for problems to solve”
David Tansley

<< FOLLOW-UP CONVERSATION >>

Saurabh Nanda:

They’ve copied the concept but changed it to make it worse.
I went to a food court in MBK Mall, Bangkok. I was given a similar card at the entry *pre-filled* with 2,000 Thai Baht (per person). I could swipe the card at all the food outlets and after I’ve had my meal, on my way out, I had to pay whatever I had used up on the card
There are advantages to this model:
1. If the food court owner and the outlets are on a revenue sharing arrangement then the cash counter can be managed by the owner. He/she will always know each outlets revenue.
2. All the outlets do not need to have cash counters & credit card machines. All of it is centralized.
3. The customer is paying through plastic, so there is always a chance of more purchases.
4. The customer does not have to fork out cash up-front.

Abhisek Sarda:

This system could work as an add-on but can’t be the only payment option. Some people might even be comfortable putting Rs.2000 on the card and using it across 6 months. But what if I am not a regular visitor? There needs to be a cash payment option.
Also, as a tourist the 2000 baht card might appeal to you. But if you are meeting a friend for coffee, would you want to go through the entire process? It just adds steps to a simple transaction.
The cost benefit isn’t that much, because all food outlets have a POS terminal anyway to swipe the Spoon card. Credit/Debit card machines are supplied by banks for free to all outlets.
Also, when you are catering to a very diverse audience, you need to make a system inclusive towards different attitudes to money.

Saurabh Nanda:

Aren’t your arguments applicable to token based food outlets as well? You first by a token/coupon from the cash counter and then you go the chaat stall to get your snacks. Spoon is not much different then. I’m sure there are some advantages in these systems that they are so prevalent.

Abhisek Sarda:

Yes, the problems of centralized billing are common to all formats of the system. However, a Haldiram outlet is much, much smaller, has fewer food counters and the owner has an over-ridding compulsion to centralize billing to check cheating by employees and also free-up the bhelpuri wala to make bhel-puri. At the mall, most outlets have a dedicated person to man the POS terminal anyway.
There are some obvious advantages (tracking sales to share revenues…) but is that good enough to screw up the customer experience? Probably not. There are simpler ways to track sales without inconviniencing the customer.