How often it has happened in the last few months that you have been left disillusioned with the service issues that you faced with top rated brands? If the answer is none, you perhaps do not use branded products and services. And if the answer is even once, then the Entrepreneurs and CEOs had better sit up and take notice, for however cliched that it may sound, their offering is in some serious trouble.
I have a personal grievance list comprising of LG, Samsung, Nokia, Panasonic, Airtel and a few more where I have had service dished out to me ranging from pathetic to unreasonable to downright hostile. However this article is not about personal cribs, it addresses a much larger issue i.e. Is the Consumer really important to companies or is it pure hogwash akin to most HR departments in well run companies? And, how can you enhance your Customer Service?
An entrepreneur personally takes pain to set up concepts or businesses when he senses a need for the same. For instance I’m ready to wager a handful of cash that Mr. V.G. Siddhartha would have dreamed up of a quiet little cafe where people could have a good time either alone or with friends on official business or for pure fun, where a certain age group of people would love to hang out. Perhaps he may have taken personal time and interest to create such a cafe and ambience. Ditto about Mr. Rajan Mittal’s unparalleled efforts in creating Airtel!
These gentlemen are legends in Indian entrepreneurship, the former setting up the most successful coffee chain, Cafe Coffee Day, with over 1500 outlets in India and the latter setting up the best known Indian telecom service. I suppose that these super brands (now) would have worked really well in a controlled environment, so much so, that the promoters would have ventured further by taking huge risks perhaps even staking their personal wealth to scale up!
Since they could not be present personally at all the points owing to the expansion and anyway it is a rather ridiculous idea having them manage operations at those levels, they hired a team to do it for them. The teams must have expanded vertically and horizontally and the control would have diminished slowly but surely.
Unfortunately like compensations, dreams and ideas get diluted as they trickle down hierarchies run by employees who have a self serving bias which percolates to the front line sales staff as well. You may verify on your own accord that the self serving bias is inversely proportional to knowledge possessed. In this case the knowledge that I refer to is the dream of the entrepreneur. So while the front line staff care about job responsibilities directly attributed to them in black and white and whereas they have the most direct line of sight to the consumer, they perhaps try to understand them the least and at best view them as minor irritants. This is a rather controversial statement, but if this were not true, why would consumer complaints be escalated to higher levels leading right up to the CEO and some times to the entrepreneur herself?
Taking the logic further, I would like to further wager that if the dreams of the Entrepreneur/CEO are communicated vividly to all the staff, irrespective of whether they have a direct customer interface and that they buy in, most of the Customer Service issues would not arise and even if they do, they will be suitably addressed and concluded at the front line levels.
Most of the front line sales staff still do not understand that they are here to serve the consumers and that consumers are not there to create work opportunities for them. For instance, I do not buy LG , Panasonic and Samsung products any more, and will not do so in the future. So with their disastrous customer service levels dished out to me, they have lost a good customer and also some of the people I influence, and if not today, sometime in the future it may affect their survival. After all, the tipping point theory works both ways- for the better or for the worse!
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