In all the businesses that I have been involved in building delighting customers has been a key priority. In India I have observed based on my experiences as a customer that with a few exceptions ( jet airways, spice jet, PVR,some 5 star hotels) customer delight does not seem important.
I have a large LCD projection TV ( Samsung) bought in 2004 that was out of warranty and developed a major defect that would cost Rs 70000 to fix. After some protracted correspondence Samsung fixed it free of cost. I was ready to go to consumer court/media etc if they did not .Now that they have fixed it my faith in Samsung as a company has gone up.
What do others think? Was Samsung stupid in fixing my TV for free or was it good strategy ?
The reason I posted this here besides recognizing Samsung was to encourage more entrepreneurs to think of customer delight in building their businesses.
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Satpal hits the nail right on the head in his last para… The main issue is that growth is so much in India that delighting customers does not provide much benefits. if one customer leave, there is another one waiting in line to rush and grab the product. So the incentive structure for this “delight” breaks down.
One side-problem that this has given rise to is the arrogance of people slightly in demand. They feel that they are doing you a favor by letting you buy from them. And the sad fact is that in many cases, there is no competitor you can go to.
One great experience I have had is with Dell. We got some workstations that had 4 GB of RAM for our developers. Windows XP SP2 recognises only 3 GB max. Dell took back the extra RAM. No qns asked. I had read a lot of bad stuff about Dell cust support in blogs. But this experience was top notch. I am actually rethinking getting a MacBook Pro.
Sanjay thanks for raising this issue.
Let me share a small experience of this with you. Recently I joined Yaari.com a social networking site to have “YAARI” experience. I wrote a detailed mail to CEO of Yaari about features I liked and areas that required some work.I still to get any response!!!!!!! .
Now when you go through the blog of successful startups like 37signals,feedburner etc oyou will always find founders explaining how important are your customers are and how they personaly replied to mails from there customers.
It is my oberservation that in India companies have “chalta hai” attitude. No matter how much they preach about “CUSTOMER DELIGHT” no even bigger player pay any attention to customers belief, needs,desires,sugesstions.
Actully “customer delight” comes at a cost.In developed countries with saturated market cost of aquiringa new cutomer is more then retaining a existing customer.While situation is reverse in India.In market and sectors where company want to retain her customers we experince this “delight”.
Yes, customer delight is one big missing piece in India – we as a society don’t have that mindset, so no wonder very few companies focus on that. It shows up not only in how the company reacts when things go wrong, but also in day-to-day execution and that is equally important…
I think that actually represents a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs as it is a relatively easy-to-execute source of competitve advantage. If you can get the organization DNA right, customer focus is easier than, say, product innovation.
To give you an example, take travel sites. At least three months ago (which was when I checked them), all of them had a lousy interface, except for Cleartrip which offers a very clean interace. So now whenever I book tickets online, instead of comparing fares across multiple travel sites, I use only Cleartrip, simply because the whole process is so hassle free and they don’t beam ads at me. They are probably charging me a premium, but I really couldn’t care. (I know this is not exactly the best example, because online travel is predicated on finding lowest fare, not the best experience, but even there some customers, like me, are willing to pay a premium for smoother fare-search).
There are numerous other examples, even in the offline world, that I encounter on a regular basis where it is clear that the company has devoted little thought to customer’s experience, often resulting in a jarring experience.
Indian society has been caught in a time vs money equation – usually money was more valuable than time, so people would suffer a more drawn out process that cost less, but now, with rapid economic growth, money is no longer so much of a constraint (not for the middle class) as it used to be and time has become more important. In fact, time is money in India and if you save the consumer some time, he will indeed be willing to pay you more!
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Dear Sanjay,
Your observations are perfectly right. However in most of the cases our “Chalta Hein” attitude doesn’t draw attention to customer delight. Perhaps this is the main reason why we are yet to shape the perception of the world towards India.