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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Hi Sanjay,
I had a similar experience with my Samsung projection TV. I too had to use the threat of consumer court and after a long and tiresome correspondence process and numerous phone calls, Samsung fixed the TV.
I believe that customer delight or even mere customer satisfaction does not exixt in India. Good examples of bad service are cellphone service providers, banks, car dealers during scheduled servicing, internet service providers, electronics dealers and many more. I’m yet to experience customer delight. Strong CRM is the key to retain your customer base which I see is a low priority for companies in India.
Just yesterday I called Expedia about using a coupon for my trip. In less than two minutes, I was speaking with a customer service guy who explained me it would be good idea to save it and use it for a package instead of flight-only trip. He volunteered to complete my reservation and booked good seats. I was done in less than 3 minutes. That’s what a customer needs – pain-less experience and advice.
Regarding customer delight, I doubt if Indian companies know / analyze what makes “happy customers” rather than “just another usual / grumpy” customers. They do just enough to keep customers. Recently I watched how an Indian airline was purposely delaying check-in, then mark passengers late and refuse boarding. Is it because people would still use their service even though it sucks?
Also, I visited Cleartrip and Yatra. Cleartrip is easy to navigate and behaves just the way you expect. But Yatra looks yucky in both Firefox and IE. I had to try hard to find menus and buttons. It makes me wonder if they even care about user-experience.
Hi,
One good example of customer delight i know of is a credit card company giving its top 999 customers in Canada an ipod. No intimations at all. Just one fine day they get their ipods and a thank you letter. Another incidence from the same company would be the country head for their Australia business calling a card member ( a high spender ) and saying thank you. As a customer this means that the company treats me as a “person” and not a “credit card account”.
I think in coming years talking to your customers would become the most important data gathering source for your product innovations etc. We do all kindof market research, customer response modeling, customer ebhavior modeling etc etc. Well why not just go and ask the customer himself!
I am actually surprised with the example of cleartrip , coz my experience with them has been harrowing. I am a frequent user and was using clear trip for the precise reason, but then they sent me a ticket with no fare and since it was on company travel , ended up footing the bill from my pocket. Try calling cleartrip and if you can get through to their customer service before 15 mins, you can consider yourself lucky…. post this I shifted to Yatra, who charged my card, did not book my ticket and took 15 days to process a refund after I asked for it…… I have shifted to flightraja now….. maybe i am an optimist afterall……
Should probably go back to the good old agent….. customer delight , whats that I ask….
Sanjay,
You asked “was Samsung stupid in fixing my TV for free or was it good strategy”
You also mention that your TV was out of warranty. Why should you then expect free service? It seems you simply hustled them into giving you a free service with the threat of adverse publicity (If all details are as presented and there are no other aspects to the case).
So was Samsung stupid.. I would say no. It was not. The cost of service is often padded up and to if they had to pay a few thousand bucks to save adverse publicity, its good strategy.
The larger issue of customer service is still valid. Companies, new or old, have scant regard for the customer and the only thing they respond to is threats and adverse publicity.
-shalini