China has Jack Ma. India has ____( fill in the blank). According to one of my fellow Band of Angel members quite a few VC’s investing in India are looking for exits by getting say a Net Flix to buy the Indian equivalent just as say Monster bought Jobs Ahead or eBay bought Baazee. They may be right and I never question what big money can do. If this is the easy way out then there is nothing wrong with it.
Atleast the two of us in the Band of Angels believe in the somewhat idealistic notion that the winners in India and then globally will be companies that provide real value to consumers and have awesome and clean user interfaces . These need to be coupled with a human or mobile last mile to achieve critical mass as a lot of people will just not use the Internet till they see a compelling reason to do so.
Customer experience is paramount. Honestly in India there are very few businesses Internet or otherwise that are great on customer experience / service. Jet Airways, PVR’s , a few restaurants in Delhi, Hutch, Airtel . On websites I cannot think of any truly great websites.
I do not for one minute believe that an insane focus on the customer is not good business strategy in India. Way back in 1985 the corporate cash management business which I led for Citibank was used by 275 of the top 300 companies in India ( an insane market share). Indian consumers may be the toughest in the world. If that is true and a business cracks the code it should be a world beater.
Am I being overly critical ? I do not know but this causes me pain. Will someone out of the one billion people stand up and fill in the blank.
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There is a netflix look alike in India called http://www.seventymm.com based out of bangalore.
I think its also a cultural thing. Indians per se like to respect institutions better than individuals. Madhu from a particular firm will be probably be treated much better than Madhu as a person. Also ties in the fact of why Indians are genereally very good with business buyers rather than consumer buyers.
Regards
Madhu
I think proper staffing and training is the only way this can be improved. The consumers also need to demand quality service and not accept shabby service. The consumer mindset needs to change.
I believe there will be several comma seperated names to fill that blank in the coming years 🙂
However why there are none right now, the reasons I think are:
1. Lack of foresight/vision and long term commitment: Indian video sharing sites, live movies online or bollywood entertainment communities would probably be some of the earliest Internet community sites. But instead of building a brand, their focus right from the beginning has been generating revenue from adsense, affiliate programs and every other possible option. Same is the reason why despite Indian food being perceived one of the best in the world, we do not have any Indian equivalent of McDonald’s.
2. Having said that we cannot blame the enterpreneurs alone. Tough customers as you pointed out, no supporting ecosystem, hard to find capital. When the paramount question be of survival, how much time is left for Innovation (thinking of Aha-user interfaces)?
3. Along with some dreamer Enterpreneurs we also need some dreamer mentors/investors/VCs/angels.
Rohit
You are very right. At the moment , most companies (even established ones) believe that good ( not to mention world class ) customer service is optional and in many cases not necessary. People invest more money building scale and creating reach, as one of the main problems till now has been to bring the goods/service to doorstep. Reliance Mobile is a good example to elaborate this point. It is another matter , what level of customer satisfaction some one like RM actually provides.But I guess it is only a matter ot time before businesses start differentiating and positioning themselves on “quality of service”. It is interesting to observe that in many cases delighting the customer actually costs hardly anything extra – educating the workforce,process redesign to minimize customer frustration etc. Even big companies are guilty of treating customers shabbily – Try subscribing to Business world Online to see how a customer interface should not be.
I think all these businesses that ake customer for granted will go the way of TRex.