Category — customer service

Customer Service would easily be one of the most oft used(and abused) words in Business. For some people, customer service means giving their customers the kind of experience they would like to get (as a customer) but for others(majority?) it’s a mere formality, a lip service that you have to offer just for the sake of it.

While customer service in itself is a big subject comprising numerous things including principles,  processes and much more, there’s a particular thing that I feel is amiss especially when it comes to online businesses, i.e. Personal Touch.

Personal Touch in customer service for online businesses is according to me a great value add given the fact that unlike offline businesses the customers are not talking to a company rep face to face or they can’t talk at length(or decide to wait in the company’s office) till their issue gets resolved. In fact Customer Service, especially over email, which is the most prominent way of offering Customer Service/Support is by design(asynchronous) a customer-unfriendly method. Given the fact that instead of talking to someone in person or over phone you are literally talking to a computer and unless the guys at other end make some real effort to add some personal elements things are bound to not be smooth.Adding Personal Touch to any non-verbal communication not only helps build credibility/trust but also ensures smooth resolution of any issues that a customer might have.

Over the last few months I’ve run into(online) customer service reps of various services including E-commerce and Mobile operators and almost NONE of them have what one can say Personal Touch in their customer service. As expected, almost all of them just work on a few standard templates which their customer service reps copy and paste. What further intrigues me is the fact that contrary to being Personal some of these online businesses try to be the opposite i.e. being as impersonal as they can be.

While this reply

is still acceptable, these ones

are completely unacceptable.
I completely fail to understand what is the ingenious thought behind hiding the identity of the person who is responding to these emails. Could it be the CEO/CTO/CFO himself?

Not only is the case of missing identity a big barrier in building any sort of rapport with the business it also complicates things as the customer never gets to know who was the person whom they last spoke to(over mail), who are they talking to now and how much do they already know about their issue.

It’s not Rocket Science that small things like how your customer service team addresses their customers (Dear Customer Vs Dear Mr Dhingra), the tone/format in which they talk or type emails(Pre-decided formats or customized replies), how they sign off their emails(Customer Service, XYZ.com or Shantanu, Post Sales Support, XYZ.com, Email:-, Ph:-) matter a lot. They especially matter a lot when you are an online business and even more so when you are just starting up.  BTW Dell India is an exception in this regard(at least)

Isn’t it great to actually see the “Full Name”(unlike just the first name) of the person who just mailed you back?
Isn’t it re-assuring to know that you also have their professional email id, telephone number and even extension in their email signature?

Besides other things, businesses should realize that by adding “Personal Touch” in their customer service, not only can they solve customer vows more quickly and efficiently, they can expect to get more/repeat business from them.

So having said all that, does your Customer Service have enough Personal Touch?

This is a classic dilemma that many entrepreneurs(especially the offline one’s) are likely to run into. Customers as we all know come in all shapes and sizes(and mindsets). While there will be some customers who will talk nicely to you and your employees, pay their bills on time and offer you a piece of advice or feedback whenever needed, there’s also a bunch of customers that’ll act as if they are doing you a big favor by using your product or services, they’ll negotiate endlessly on the price and keep getting into endless debates about the most minute(and irrelevant) issues possible.

As an entrepreneur and consultant both I too have run into the thought of segmenting customers into good,bad and ugly but I am not completely convinced if that’s such a good idea. I mean on one hand there’s a thought of optimizing the whole thing for a better ROI on other hand there’s this idealistic thought that customers/clients should be treated fairly and equally irrespective of their spending powers and other behaviors. I for sure would like to get a fair/equal treatment in all the products and services that I use irrespective of the segment I belong to.
If you are committed to offering a delightful customer service the non-segmentation of your customers is highly likely to come in your way. As pointed by Seth Godin here

If you’re going to be obsessed with delighting customers, it’s a lot more efficient to focus on customers that are able to be delighted.

A case in point being if a particular bunch of customers is impossible or way too difficult to delight/please why waste your resources on them when you could focus ‘em on some other set of customers that are more likely to be delighted by what you are offering?

A few things I could think of that one needs to keep in mind if such a situation arises are

1. Is the customer bad or your offering?
   A situation like this can also be a opportunity to give your offering another in-depth look. Maybe the customer is right and there’s indeed a scope for offering a better solution at the same or reduced price or maybe the customer service offered isn’t up to the mark. So before branding a customer as a bad apple, give a second thought to their feedback and see if there’s a genuine problem there.
2. How would it affect the Word of Mouth?
   While not giving the same time, attention etc to a not so good customer might be a good utilization for your resources it might have a spill over effect. In cases like these it is also pragmatic to ensure that your segmented behaviour will not spiral into a bad WOM loop. To avoid that ensure that this bunch/segment are not influencers/thought leaders or highly connected individuals from your target segment. For ex: If you are targeting a product or service aimed at doctors and for some reason you decide to segment them, try to ensure that your segmentation policy will not spill over to other doctors and doctors as a community tend to be highly connected to each other
3. Customer Segmentation != Spending power segmentation
   While you’ll find plenty of real life instances in which retailers/suppliers and many more tend to treat customers with high spending powers differently, it’s not the most wise thing to do. When I started this discussion though I included “paying bills on time”  and negotiation I never mentioned spending power as the deciding factor. I strongly feel segmenting your customers based on just their spending power isn’t such a good idea
4. Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you
   One should always keep “The Golden Rule” in mind before taking any call on customer segmentation. This will most certainly save you from some bad decisions

What do you think about treating different customers differently?

Amongst all this hype of Twitter and how tons of companies use it for customer service etc it never really occured to me that how Twitter isn’t doing anything noteworthy to interact with its customers and offer them support/help.

Though there is an account http://twitter.com/twitter, people using it never talk to Twitter users.

Call it generalization but I’ve always felt that Customer Service is just lip service for most small and big companies in India. The bigger they(companies) get the ridiculous their customer service becomes. Talking about customer service or its non-existence brings me to Aircel.

Aircel is a joint venture between Maxis Communications (Malaysia) and Apollo Hospital Enterprise Ltd (India) and has more than 18 million subscribers(source: wikipedia). Those in India would remember Aircel from its awkward tune and TV ads starring Indian cricket team captain MS Dhoni which were aired endlessly for months. Aircel apparently has a 200cr media budget and it shows by their massive ad spend both offline and online. Aircel is a typical case of  The TV-Industrial Complex which goes like

Buy TV Ads –> Get More Distribution –> Sell More Products –> Make a profit –> Buy TV Ads

While they maybe doing a a good job at buying more ads and getting more subscribers I seriously doubt if they are doing any good beyond it. In case you are wondering why do I think so, here’s the thing.

Last Friday(25th sep) I happened to buy an Aircel connection on a whim. Actually I was out to buy a vodafone prepaid connection for my brother but due to its unavailability we thought of giving Aircel a try and given the plans I was told it definitely looked like a wise decision. The new connection was activated in minutes and I was a happy man but that happiness wasn’t for long. When I reached home (about 5 minutes drive from the Aircel showroom/office) I was surprised to find that phone had no network coverage and putting the new sim in three different cell phones didn’t help a bit.

Freaked that I was I tried getting in touch with their customer service but despite hearing ‘we are keen to talk to you’ messages I couldn’t get through the customer care executives in 4 different(2 by my brother) calls that I made which lasts 2-3 minutes each. While cursing Aircel I thought of checking out their site for a possible solution and got to this page

(Aircel doesn’t think it’s useful to give phone numbers of its various offices/showrooms)

and immediately sent them an email

As you can see I wasn’t really hoping anyone at Aircel would read that email, let alone act upon it and Aircel lived up to its expectations. However that wasn’t it, I went to their store the next morning (10:30 AM) and got the executive there to register my complaint and on being asked how much time will it take to get it resolved and should I really expect any solution for my problem(I really don’t expect them to put a tower near my locality just because I complained) I was told complaints are addressed in 24 hours and they(Aircel) are installing 10 new sites a month based on customer feedback (like I will buy that).

That was Saturday morning and I waited in vain till evening to get a call on the alternate number I had given (Email reply is obviously out of question). I asked a local shop keeper about Aircel network and he too agreed that their network coverage is quite bad. Without wasting any time I bought a new Airtel connection(which is doing pretty good). Curious to see what others think of Aircel I did a search on Twitter

and a quick search on Google revealed

More Aircel Complaints can be read here and here. There’s also a post by Abhishek aptly titled ‘Aircel India: false start‘

Now that we’ve seen how bad things are with Aircel one can only wish if Aircel was listening and spending money on building better network/services instead of spending millions on roping in celebrities for lame TV ads.

How has been your experience with Aircel?

PS: Had it not been for a long weekend and some optimism on my side in hoping for a reply, I would have written this post on Saturday itself