India has embarked on a consumption journey. The internal demand based growth has put the country in prosperous cycle of investment-production-consumption and we can witness it across the country. It goes without saying that this growth has left behind many millions of Indians who are or were dependent on agriculture. We can see a slum in the neighbourhood of a large housing society or apartment complex irrespective of a big-ticket growth city which reveals the ground reality. How to include these Indians in this growth cycle has and will remain a challenge for the governments until the government takes revolutionary steps with the delivery mechanism which needs a huge facelift.
Let’s start from here. We are seeing a lot of companies which are serving customers on a day-to-day basis. These include mainly telecom, consumer goods and banking. These companies are very good at marketing and brand creation/maintenance and the data in their results show it. However, I see customer service suffering regularly.
These companies are good at providing service on a regular basis though they play with words with customers. If you pick telephone bill of any company, I am not sure if you can explain all the charges or get an explanation from your telecom company.
If you look at a new product offerings from these companies, you may need a lawyer or a consultant to understand what the product means and how it will create holes in your pocket. Yes, the first thing is complexity. Sometimes I feel that these companies are thriving on complexity. Probably this is what inspired Airtel to launch a simple INR 1/- plan and this was a timely step in right direction. The same holds true for your credit card.
The telecom regulator doesn’t help customers either. I find TRAI standing with telecom companies against the customers. Let’s talk about number portability. Anybody who has worked in telecom domain will tell you that it is the simplest thing to implement. Why? You need a switch which can route your call from existing service provider to new service provider without any change in the number. The cost of the switch is $5 (approximately INR 200/-). I don’t think people would not like to pay INR 200/- to change the service operator if service operator is not able to serve properly.
The second is customer communication. I find it both ways. Many times if the customer is not urban or not educated enough, he finds it very difficult to communicate his problem and suffers indefinitely. The point I am trying to make it everybody wants these customers to change but nobody wants to change for these customers. I haven’t yet seen a customer care centre which can talk to people in their own language or help them to resolve their queries/questions. I will quote one example. One prominent private sector bank goes to villages in Rajasthan and requests villagers to have bank account with them. The villagers are charmed by the brand and open account with minimum balance of INR 5000/-. Nobody from the bank explains the customer or customer tries to understand what ‘minimum balance’ means and how it may affect them. The villager doesn’t use this account on a day-to-day basis and just checks his balance after 6 months or so. Now he finds that bank has deducted money from his account because he could not maintain minimum balance and why? Because the bank first deducted INR 200/- for debit card which made bank account having less than INR 5000/- and then penalized the account because the customer couldn’t maintain INR 5000/-. If we think about this issue, it is no less than cheating. Now the poor villager runs from pillar to post to get his remaining money back and to close the account.
The third issue is service as per the customer not the other way around. I will also take the opportunity to congratulate these companies which have made an attempt to include many people in their service domain by making their services affordable. The service has become affordable but the degree of customer service doesn’t match this affordability.
I think concerned regulator should devise a customer service index which should be published in media on a monthly basis. It will help us to set a standard level for customer service. TRAI does this exercise and evaluate telecom operators on a predefined parameter however it never publishes it in customer friendly manner.
Another aspect is do Indians have customer service attitude? I think serving customers is more of an attitude rather a skill. Off course, one need to get basic training, however, not everybody can serve the customers with same energy and enthusiasm on a daily basis. When it comes to serving customers through a faceless medium, it becomes difficult and makes this job mundane. The idea is to select the right set of people through a different process. A lot of companies are finding hard to manage attrition which adds to woes for the customers. One more thing these companies need to understand is that they need to have a different perspective on customer service. It must been seen more an investment rather than an expenditure. Sometimes I get a feeling that Indian bosses try to cut costs for this department and try to employ minimum number of people to serve maximum number of customers. Additionally, these customer service representatives are not backed by best of systems and infrastructure which adds to regular struggle with performance pressure resulting in attrition.
In addition, we are in the initial years of consumption and the companies are concentrated on capacity expansion, new customer acquisition and winning new territories. As customers become experienced and educated about these services, these companies will respond to the customer’s needs. As I think, India Inc. will witness an era when customer service will be the major competitive advantage rather than cost advantage at present.
