Service in Pandemic!

 

9623 comments on the last article: Thank you indeed.

Yes, I am guilty of not having responded to all of them (yet) but there is no way I am going to leave them unattended indefinitely. Revealing a little routine to you, I have budgeted around 2 hours every Sunday afternoon, which is between 4 and 6 PM to respond to the comments. Most weeks, I manage to get to anything between 90% to 95% in this period and the balance, I attend to late in the night, between 10 and 11 PM. Because the volume has grown, 4 times the usual, the time allocated is proving to be grossly inadequate. So I have decided to add another two hours on Sunday morning, between 6 AM and 8 AM to this, so before you read my next write up, not only I would have completed responding to all the comments but also, made a way to make the exchange near to real-time, that is by allocating 30 minutes each day of the week, between 9:30 and 10 PM. We will see how it goes.

Thank you again!

Going by the most requested title, I wish to talk about "service in the age of Pandemic" with this article. 

Guided by the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as customers and bussiness mature, expectations that they hold from one another also evolves. In the last decade or so we have witnessed 'service' move up in the value chain, from being one more thing that organisations did some more reluctantly than the others to the prevalent norm now in which superior customer service/experience is increasingly being showcased as key business differentiator. Service in the modern age has gained strategic importance. Enormously successful service stories can be found in the growth of : Apple, Amazon, Legos, Zappos and Hyatt.

You can’t deliver an exceptional experience without investing time, effort and money in building a customer-centric culture in your organisation.

If the customer service department is often projected as solely responsible for both driving and delivering customer experience in your organisation, then the pathology is suggestive of the absence of customer-centricity in the thought process of the organisation. Service, unfortunately, is one of those things that requires involvement from everyone, so either everyone in the organisation is delivering customer service or no one is. It is binary in that sense. Remember a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Customer pays to keep you in business and therefore there is every reason for you to serve them to the best of your delivery capability and fiscal ability. You can’t cheat or shortcircuit your way into the heart and the mind of your customer, it just does not work, that way.

I draw on my 1.6-decade long experience delivering service to say that ‘Best service is when the need to seek service is not felt by the customer, so no need for service is the best form of service’.

It is not easy to attain, and given how complex, conflicting and competitive the business landscapes can get and how dynamic, ever-evolving and demanding customers expectations are in today's world: the road to customer service is constantly under construction. It won’t be wrong to say that your best service experience will be the one that you’ll deliver in days to come (the underlying assumption being that you’ll learn from your experience of past delivery)

COVID19 disruption has also given an unusual opportunity to organisations to wipe their slate clean, hit refresh and reposition themselves as caring service brands, even if their past has not been a particularly peppy or pompously proud one. Question is how to do it? It is vital for us to recognise that for the case of service to exist and for a brand to gain from its benefits in the shape of unflinching customer loyalties and becoming a magnet for new acquisitions, the business itself has to sustain commercially. Business adapts to survive the changing economic, societal, and political climate in the geographies that they operate in. So let’s spend some time to understand the shift that COVID19 has brought about so that our plans can become informed.

McKinsey conducted a study to understand how the pandemic and related economic turbulences have impacted buying behaviours in the Asia Pacific (India, China and Indonesia) region. Before I present some of the findings from the study, we must compulsively apply cautious optimism on our outlook and accept that different regions within a continent-sized country like ours can experience different pandemic progression and economic revitalisation. Impact on no two sectors of the economy is alike too. So, let’s comprehend the below findings in that light.

1. Discretionary spending amounts to 1/4th to 1/5th of the GDP in the Asian countries.
2. There has been a dip of 90% in the overall discretionary spending.
3. Acceleration in intent to use digital channels over stores to experience products has been found.
4. Citizens are hopeful of recovering the money that they lost by the end of the year.
5. The ticket size of purchase has changed: Large items like the vehicle, construction and jewellery have been put off indefinitely.
6. 1/3rd said that they plan to spend less than initially planned.
7. Trusted brands are at the top consideration for their purchase, alongside purchase being good value for money.
8. Guilt and unease coming from the social context have also prevented large spendings.
9. Higher intent to visit exclusive brand store than multiple brand outlets was expressed.
10. Getting it first time right is more valuable now as customers do not have the luxury of ‘touch and feel’ of the physical store or the cash to lose on trial and error.

Let’s superimpose -5% GDP growth outlook that the reputed Moody has proposed for India, on the changing customer behaviour that we just read about. Value polarisation is palpable. The unprecedented rise in unemployment has accentuated the damage the economy is suffering from contracting demand. India is slowly reopening, supply chain interruption instigated loss on value, however, is of a scale that can’t be recovered easily. Therefore, writing them off seems like most practical though not as a fiscally prudent option, at the moment for most businesses.  

Thankfully, we are not without intelligence, ground realities and evolving market reactions are unfolding at least in our sight if not pleasantly and predictably, at every turn. We no longer have the benefit of reaction time, though, adjustments are required to be made on near realtime basis. How do we then approach service design, should our customer service philosophies change, are the questions that are on top of the minds of the business leaders today? Let’s address those. Organisational goals have to be re-written not just the financials but also performance and learning goals, to accommodate the recent developments. From the customer service perspective, the one metric that organisations must go after, in my view, is. 

Reducing customer effort: Lesser the customer has to toil to use your product services the better will your chances of beating the competition be.

Harvard researchers have tabulated multiple studies to gauge how customers deal with difficulties that brand inadvertently put in their way and how do these difficulties influence their decision making on purchase and continuity. Here are some of the findings that can be used to formulate an effective service strategy. 

1. High effort interaction is more likely to lead to churn.
   1. Hard conversations had just 6% chances of conversion while easy conversation had a high 80% propensity.
2. Difficult category interaction doubled from 10% in pre Covid19 times to 20% in the pandemic.
   1. Financial hardship related interactions appeared most difficult to handle for the organisations. 

Actions :

At this stage, it is essential to conduct a detailed customer journey mapping exercise, to understand how easy or difficult are each step of the engagement are for the customer. Remember, to conduct this exercise from the point of view of the customer and not from the perspective of operational viability. You can use any of the below methods.

1. Focus group
2. Survey 
3. Intelligent control group study. 

If you can, make sure that this special project is managed by someone who did not design the existing process. It is vital from an intellectual integrity perspective and also to actively avoid, conformance bias. You have to study every aspect of customer engagement, from start to end, of the relationship.  

1. Interest 
2. Exploration 
3. Education 
4. Sign up
5. Subscription 
6. Usage 
7. Complaint handling 
8. Feedback
9. Billing
10. Communication 
11. Upgrade
12. Churn 

Every aspect of your existence in the customer’s universe of both 'experience and expectations' must be studied. Map all the processes in a manner that output of one process becomes the input of the next process, in a long and detailed ‘input - process - output’ string. Then code each step on a level of difficulty. You can mark them based on the time needed for customers to interact with your offering Vis-a-Vis the best in class in your industry segment or on the simplicity of understanding and the cognitive effort that your setup mandates the customer to put in to fully comprehend your product/service. Label them, as high, medium and low. 

As you have the entire process in front of you must know that processes marked as low must be made even simpler; target to bring down the existing complexity/time taken by at least 20%. The medium and high must be restructured, reorganised or altered, as the case may be with the highest sense of urgency. It must be done as of yesterday. When you conduct these exercises be mindful of the limitations of the environment in which your staff must be working in, given the distributed and digitized delivery that seems to have become the new normal, in the work from home era of delivery, things like:

• Unstable phone connections.
• No one to ask support from (in person). 
• Patchy internet connection.
• Hardware issues. 
• The noisy environment of operation. 

These limitations have to be accommodated when you form your responses, in the new (to be) process. 

‘Customer advocacy’ is critical, you have to champion the cause of the customer, never let it go out of sight. I outline it over again here because process mapping is going to be a longspun, difficult and daunting exercise. Remember, that when you hide behind policy limitations you give the customers a reason to choose your competition over you. You have to find a way to do what your customer expects you to, keeping in mind that the service offering has to remain competitive, lucrative and at the same time financially and operationally viable. On the rare occasion that you have to say no, make sure that your delivery is as empathetic and as information-rich as it possibly can be. Note that customers do not reach you to find eloquence but resolution. Even if you were to put conversationalists par excellence like Dr Shashi Tharoor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, Dr Richard Hans, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy- the customers may still walk out unhappy and unserved if the issue is not resolved to his/her satisfaction in time lesser than he/she expected to and is willing to invest on your brand. It is hard ...very hard .. but that is the fun of it all if you ask me.

There is another element to the COVID19 crisis- what must be done here and now. What must the first responders of the service industry do, to save the day? Thankfully, a well-researched framework from Harvard is available for it as well.

Professor Ted Waldron (Harvard business school ) and Professor James Wetherbe (Texas tech university) in a jointly conducted research have come up with the 'HEART concept' of dealing with customers at the time of crisis. What you’ll read now is my understanding of the framework.

1. Humanise your company.
   1. Remind the customer of what they love about the experience and the products, that they have been using.
   2. It is vital to say that you understand what they are going through.
   3. If fiscally possible find ways to re-pay them from your profits.
      1. Like extending warranty or subscription etc.
      2. Downtime waiver.
2. Educate customers about the change.
   1. Customers must know the changes that you had to bring in the way you operated, to deliver in these unusually tough circumstances.
   2. Customers are smart and most importantly they are also living through the horror themselves, so communication, at this stage if kept sincere will be received with greater warmth than usual. 
3. Assure stability.
   1. Customer needs to know that you’re going to be around. That you are committed to making it work.
   2. List all the great things that you are doing and are willing to consider to make the transition seamless for the customer.
4. Revolutionise offerings.
   1. Underscore the product, process and tech innovation that you’ve introduced in your business. Demonstrate a few if possible.
   2. Communicating more is better.
5. Take on the future.
   1. ‘Going above and beyond’ is to be illustrated to the customer
   2. Convey the things that you have learnt from the crisis.
   3. Your customer should know that you as a brand are willing to listen and to learn. 
   4. The humility of the brand is respected by the customer. 

Thus far we have covered, 

1. Changing customer behaviour.
2. Service philosophy re-design.
3. 'Here and now' action items. 

The last thing that I wish to bring to your notice is the emergence of the digital.

As you can see in this chart, close to half of the adults in this country are ‘online’ and so should you be. Because to reduce the customer effort you should be present where the customer is, the customer should not have to invest energy in shifting mediums to find you. The trick is not in achieving digitization alone, you will have to make digitalization and digital transformation; all three of them happen to gain long lasting competitive advantage. Organisations need to find a way to make digital more human so that it can compensate for the loss of real human connections that people are experiencing with the COVID19 imposed social distancing. 

The character of technology is impersonal; no matter who you are ‘cmd+C’ is only going to copy; therefore there is a need to massage the message well so that customers on the digital platform, feel how human your intent is.

I hope this has been helpful, see you on the other side.

Stay safe.

You need Omni-channel & More!

The relationship between a customer and a brand revolves around a multitude of interactions that happens between them in the course of their journey together.

Customers expect to get all that they have signed up for and more without having to pay extra and the brands wish to make use of every possible opportunity to serve to the best of their abilities and resources, they create products, services, and related loops for the customers to keep coming back to them when in need & even otherwise. These objectives may appear conflicting from a distance but they actually are complimenting in nature. Companies spend a lot of time and money in preparing the foundation, as it were, for them to give prospects and customers a tour of their capabilities, educating them on the entire range of products and services is vital to gaining a larger share of the customer wallet. Investments are made in creating soothing, easy-on-the-eye, and nearly omnipresent digital footprint, from good looking, responsive &  intuitive websites to active social media participation. More traditional, brick and mortar establishments are also brought into the play, from choosing the right real estate to designing and erecting swanky showrooms: companies do it all. Not to mention that maintenance of both digital and physical assets come at a cost.

The question then is, is it enough to deliver an excellent customer experience? Do customers care about better or smarter solutions? These questions are important, no matter how complete a solution might appear to its creator if the customer/ end users do not see the considerable value and/or cozy comfort or both in it, it is not of good use and often will deliver less than ideal outcomes.

To understand this better, let’s take two examples.

Scenario #1

Customer: Payal Singh.

Need: Booking a holiday.

Chain of events :

1. Payal goes to the website, logs in with her credentials.
2. Provides her search criteria.
3. Makes to the relevant selection of the airline.
4. Provides passengers details.
5. Comes to the payment page.
6. Keys in the banking details.
7. Is greeted by transaction failure.
8. She tries one more time only to face a repeat of the error.
9. She goes back to the home page and starts her search for the ‘contact us’ page.
10. She finds the customer support number and calls up.
11. She is greeted by the IVR and a never-ending list of irrelevant options.
12. After spending, longer than she had expected to, she reaches the agent.
13. The agent greets her and waits for the customer to share her reason for calling.
14. The customer by then is already frustrated but keeps her cool and explains the entire story to the agent.
15. The agent places the call on hold, checks the information.
16. Comes back from hold and tries to authenticate the customer one more time because, in his book, it is customer account-specific information and must only be divulged to the right party.
17. Post +ve verification, says that the payment gateway is down and she must try another time.

The customer bangs the phone feeling absolutely frustrated, infuriated & disheartened. Despite putting in much effort and time she is still without a definitive resolution, she doubts if she should give the brand another chance. She tweets about the horrible experience before the agent finishes his shift her entire followers have read about it: some have liked and retweeted the incident too, causing the brand a lost sale and tarnished online reputation.

Net-net nothing has been achieved so far, neither by the customer nor by the organization. Both have had to face negative experiences and are displeased with the way things have turned out.

Let’s look at another example.

Scenario #2

Customer: Iqbal Ahmed.

Need: Booking a holiday.

Chain of events: Identical till step number 7.

8) Is greeted by transaction failure alert.

9) Right after the failure message, the pop up saying “ Allow us to help you” appears.

10) Iqbal clicks on the pop-up and reads,

1. Would you like us to call you back?
2. You can chat with us too.

11) Customer clicks on the chat option.

12) Agent “Ram” greets the customer and says, apologies for the error, allow me to check it and get back to you.

13) Iqbal feeling exasperated scrolls up and hits on the “Would you like us to call you back?” button.

14) Chat window gets updated, Ram will call you on your registered number “9835098350” in 2 minutes.

15) Before the customer could pour himself a cup of coffee, his phone rings.

16) The caller, the same agent he had initiated his chat with, greets him with a solution.

1. The agent from his integrated CRM was able to see the stage in which the customer had invoked the chat.
2. He had studied customer history and was aware of the complete profile.
3. There wasn’t a need for the customer to repeat the issue.
4. The customer had the option to choose between chat and voice support.
5. Both channels were instant.

17) He offered the customer an alternative and guided him through the steps.

18) Flight tickets were done.

19) The agent from the customer history could find out that he was looking for his wedding anniversary and then suggested, below options and offered additional & special anniversary discount to him.

1. Airport pick up
2. Options for beach facing hotel room.
3. Candlelight dinner in perfect settings.
4. Private musical show.
5. Florist Options.
6. Tour of the city
7. Photographer on call.
8. Suggested a variety of cakes to choose from.
9. He also presented to the customer with the option to visit the famous state museum in the city on the day of his return.

20) The customer was delighted and took a few options suggested.

1. The agent had access to his past bookings and the profile of the customer.
2. His integrated CRM suggested smart related bundles.
3. Given the size of the booking, he could provide the customer with a pre-authorized, on the spot discount.
4. Planned the entire holiday and not just flight tickets.

21- The agent also took permission from the customer and blocked his calendar and provisioned for auto call reminders for key activities.

22- The call ended with a happy customer and a happier business.

Which is going to be the most likely seen in your organization?

Scenario 1 or 2?

If it is 1, you most certainly need to urgently deploy an Omnichannel support layer integrated smartly with the CRM/order management system. It will not only prepare you to provide customers with instant resolution but will also make you present at whichever mode that the customer would like you to assist him on? Intelligent integration with the order management/CRM tool as depicted in example 2 will also enable the service agent to help the customer make logical choices related to their need, resulting in bounty upsell/upgrade opportunity for the business and desirable convenience for the customer: resulting in a stronger relationship between the two.

When presented options of upgrade/upsell are contextual in nature those options appear meaningful to the customers and they are more likely to buy from you again. In the entire process, we saw how a potential deal-breaker “transaction failed” turned into a delightful customer experience in scenario 2; and it achieved a great experience without making the customer toil, like in the first undesirable case that we looked at. Customers love being spoilt with pleasant options but at the same time, they hate having to work for it. It is therefore important that when you design your systems, you keep the customer effort index in mind.

If you do all the work for your consumer, your consumer will love you more. Most organizations have all the tech, people, and other infrastructure that is needed to create scenario 2 like a rich experience. What they lack is omnichannel and supported intelligent integrations. They do not use customer profile/ purchase history data intelligently to create circumstantial product bouquet, which makes them incapable of churning out products that can be upsold at that right instance quickly and they most certainly do not have a single screen for their support agent, which makes responses appear fragmented, ill-informed and mostly random to the customer, causing poor memory of the brand.

Integrate your CRM/order management system with a capable Omni Channel solution, keep all options open for your customers to choose from, restricting your customers either to only voice or only data ( ChatBOT, email, form-based interaction, etc) is not a wise choice to make. Use data analytics to create a meaningful product/ service bundles and most importantly have a single screen set up, so that the support agent without sweating is able to give the most accurate and the most relevant information to the customer, thereby reducing customer effort.

Omnichannel is a good choice to make, invest in your systems to elevate the quality of customer interactions.

Happy serving!

Glitter ≠ Gold!

All that glitters is not gold, this golden phrase applies to customer centricity just as much as it does to other things. If you were to look at one common publically pronounced feature between organization of all scales and statures: old and new age and also between successful, just hanging around and stark failures; you’ll find that all of them have sung praises for their customers, some louder and in denser perfunctory pitch than the others. Unfortunately, saying and doing are not the same thing, as of yet. We have enough data in the common knowledge to prove that the organizations that care about their customers in the true sense of the word and in spirit, not only do well but also go on to become a groundbreaking success. All brands of repute and recognization have happy customers in common. I would not name organizations at this stage but would rather ask you to think of a few brands that you have interacted with lately to meet your need, list them and then alongside, rate your experience with them on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being lowest and 5 being the highest. Take a moment now to do some research on these organizations to see if those who served you well were also sound business performance/revenue wise? People to people variation adjusted, you’d witness that the brand that delivered a better experience are also those that are doing excellent or at least better than the ones that annoyed you unwarranted, at least 85% of the times. Well, if your experiment tells you otherwise, I suggest you expand your sample wrt to time & interactions and then repeat, you’ll notice a confirmatory trend emerge.

If even then you see that those who cared little are doing better; take it with a pinch of salt for every dog has his day; good thing is that dog will not have all the days to itself, surely, it will move out of the 15% short term exception that we spoke about earlier into the oblivion, never to return. Like there's now no debate on the fact that open defecation is unhealthy, in the business world there is consensus on considering ‘customer experience’ as an item to strategic importance.

Many progressive groups are creating positions like chief experience officer/ principal support office etc to drive the mandate of customer experience across the group. They are moving away from having people lead a certain line of business in solitude and are now marching towards onboarding people with appropriate intellect and sufficient seniority to lead the entire machinery. In some cases, business operation leaders have been made accountable to the office and chair of experience officer to make sure that the business, in particular, the sales/delivery functions do not get carried away and foolishly trade short term growth for long term experience damage. I find it to be a good way of defining and demonstrating intent.

We perhaps cannot emphasize enough on the fact that the world around us is rapidly changing, in most cases at a pace stronger than the speed of adaptability of most organizations. The hunger to receive greater value from the limited investment is growing faster than ever in the minds of the customers, it won’t be an understatement to say that it is almost insatiable. To make matters even more complex, with it, what is also gaining ground is the unforgiving attitude of the customers. Think of it, in a market as crowded as ours and in times as lucid, in which 73% of moving population has 1.5 computing devices each (smartphones) with them, 96% of which is connected to the internet 67% of the day. No idea in today’s world is unique, before you know it a bunch of passionate people with a few computers on table in a garage and big dreams in their eyes will create a cooler organization to deliver what you considered your proprietary service and if they also happen to be folks who understand service and experience ; God save you! So, how do we approach this? In most simple terms, you need to have people who understand service, who are progressive and if not visionary at least thinkers who know to apply their minds to imagine what might be of value to customers in days to come and then set up the backend operations in motion to deliver solutions if not ahead of time at least not behind it.

Customers no longer see sore encounters as problems in isolation. Gone are the days when a rude salesman at the retail outlet was seen as a bad apple, today, one such bad experience is all that a customer needs to not only not buy but also quickly taps on the blue screens to let their entire new age friends and followers know about it. Connected world amplifies error in ways that expose the brand’s vulnerability in ways most egregious. So you got to cover the entire spectrum of things to deliver one excellent experience. Interaction between a customer and a brand, as we know it, happens at various levels starting with the customer gaining awareness of the product and or service, goes on to the period when they conduct discovery around what they have already gathered, specs are compared, prices are gauged at this stage customer also often seeks feedback from existing users. Technology provides for review to be read. From all of these customers cultivate interest, and then the forecasted purchase happens. Things do not stop there, they become vigilant for post-sale service and if you do things right not only will you get repeat purchase but also cause the customer to give you advocacy benefits; all of it put together is customer experience in its totality.

I quoted, the below findings from a reputed research firm in the customer fest panel discussion that I attended last month and it is so apt that I do not get tired of quoting i again and again. On my website, I have embedded the video of the 7 minutes talk, that I gave, should it interest you, you can watch it as well.

The research finding:

When Bain & Company asked organizations to rate their quality of customer experience, 80% believe they are delivering a superior experience. This is compared to only 8% of customers who believe they are receiving a great customer experience.

Cleary, companies, and customers are not always on the same page, especially, the leadership team, those who spend days and weeks without really getting in touch with a real customer, personally. If you happen to be one such person, you do not necessarily have to step out to meet customers, while if you do that it will be awesome. What you can and must alternatively do is listen to recordings of support calls or read emails. Every now and then, make time to respond to customers on your own, unassisted. And you will know exactly how fragmented your systems are, which all parts need repair and what (people, process, technology) must be replaced right away. Employee satisfaction is also a good indicator and so is attrition (the bad attrition). Unhappy people do not create great customer experience and if you see imminent brain drain, great people leaving your organization; you should know all is not well. Well, now that you have a good sense of how your customers see you, you must take credible, verifiable, sustained & resolute action to change things for better as swiftly as you possibly can.

Every company is different, every customer is unique; yet, there are a few principles that are ubiquitous and in some sense form the basis of creating a customer-centric organization. Five fundamentals of creating a formidable foundation of fantastic experience that comes to my mind are.

1. Clear customer experience vision: It is vital to include customer experience in the statement of direction, with financial goals you should also have unambiguously documented service performance objectives. You can take inspiration from benchmark studies of your industry but you have to have it. You must also invest effort, time and money in making sure that everyone in your corporation understands what those visions, goals, and principles are with clarity and confidence so much so that they should be able to articulate it without difficulty in their own words. COPC standard of service is also in conformance of this, tip.

2. Know your customers: It is inevitable, you have to know who your customers are, where do they come from, what their needs, wants and preferences are. In a market as diverse as modern day India, you are most likely to find every kind of imaginable customer in your mix. Broadly categorize them, give them personas and personalities; age-old, marketing and profiling technique. Create suitable approaches for each of these personas and then train your staff on it: operationalize the model. Make sure your profiling is data based, flex your analytical muscle to its full glory here.

3. Create customer engagement roadmap: Research by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of the experience is based on emotion as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions, the same research also says that business that optimizes for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 80% in sales growth. So go out there and express yourself, remember every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to win his loyalty. Build a comprehensive moment of truth map of your customer journey and make sure you leave nothing to chance. Prepare well, it is the least that you must do.

4. Feedback is gold: Nothing will give you better insight than the voice of your customers, tap into that rich source. Get as close to real-time as possible, deploy the tools of measuring customer satisfaction. When it comes to feedback, equally critical & perhaps more estimable is the feedback that your employees can give you. Remember, your employees serve your customers - they know it. Create an environment conducive to the seamless and fearless exchange of information. I have written an entire article on this item. Linking it here for those of you who wish to hear a little more from me ;)

Article: Customer Feedback, should you care?

Link:  http://www.lavkush.co.in/2017/12/customer-feedback-should-you-care/

5. Execute with energy, enthusiasm, and urgency: Broken parts can broadly be categorized into two segments 1) education failure 2) malfunction; both of these come into existence because, there are gaps in either process, the skill of employees, systems, and sometimes even all. Some are contributed by faulty technology too but for the sake of simplicity, we can say that the process encompasses systems too. Have strong process reengineering in place, complement it with an intelligent framework to measure the skill level of your staff against desired standards so that time-bound plans for upskilling of resources can be created. At times you might have to hire from outside to speed the process, should the situation demand it, do not hesitate.

These 5 steps are not the whole deal but do serve as a great beginning. Let’s aim to create excellent customer experiences at every turn.

BTW, I’ve shifted my articles to my own website from the Google blogger platform that I used to benefit from earlier, do look around and let me know if you like what you see. Bye-bye.