The building blocks of exceptional customer service!

Building blocks of building customer service from the seminal work - Outside -in paraphrased in my words!

• Service Strategy 
  • Best defined as intended experience, what is the kind of experience that you wish to extend to your users. Is it going to be COSTCO or Apple? Is it going to be an Airtel or LG? It is important to clearly define what is it that you wish to extend to your customers as experience. The strategy, therefore, is an expression of intent more than anything else.
• Understanding of the customer
  • Knowing who your customers are what is it that they want? What their expectations are from the organisation? Understanding customer expectations is only the half job done. What is it that they call good service? Archetypical segregation of customers is a good way to devise a strategy that will fit different kinds of customers that have to be dealt with. The methods that can be deployed range between
    • Solicited feedback and other unsolicited ways.
      • Surveys and using various opportunities to interact with the customers to form an understanding about them.
    • Communicating the findings with the staff is another equally important thing to do as only after they understand what the expectation is, will they be able to deliver on them.
• Service Design
  • Everything between envisioning and implementation of interactions that create the customer experience. It is about being intentional about designing the process, people, technology, platform, and inter-departmental exchanges to tailor the kind of customer experience that the brand wants to extend. It also is about opening a lab kind of a concept in which, feedback from customers and understanding of the staff and the partners on the impediments to excellent exchange between the customer and the company can happen, to be discussed and solutions to be found. It is about making sure that no bad design makes it to the real customer world. It is about bringing intentionality into the entire process.
• Measurement
  • Is a discipline that makes the organisation measure the quality of customer experience by assigning relevant metrics to it, that matter the most to customers, in a consistent manner across the organisation. The end goal of measurement is to give actionable insights to the organisation uncovering areas of improvement, alongside given pointed descriptions of :
    • What must be fixed immediately?
    • What should be improved over time?
    • What should be maintained at the same level?
    • What should be touted as the strength of the organisation?
  • The goal is to understand what are the elements in the organisation that help customers be loyal and then create systems to make sure that those things are taken care of.
  • Another important utility of measurement is to put the quality of customer service parameters right up there with business metrics like sales and profitability.
• Governance
  • If customer experience strategy is game-plan, governance is the referee and the rule book. The job is to constantly monitor and weed out bad causes from creeping into the customer service design. It is responsible for holding people accountable to the commitment to serve. It can be the conscience keeper and at the same time also a practice that has the ability to steer things back on track, if and when things go wrong.
• Culture
  • A set of shared values and behaviours that focus employees on creating exemplary customer service. Culture is the bloodline of any organisation, getting it right is most daunting and time-consuming. It requires constant reinforcement. Three key steps are
    1. Hiring - Hiring for value fitment, “hire for will and train for skill”. Commitment to service, customer centricity are a few traits that must be evaluated in hiring people.
    2. Socialising - The stories of the great customer experience must be told and re-told. The objective is to find the right rituals and the routine to reinforce the need to value customers and act in keeping with the highest standard of customer service delivery in mind.
    3. Reward - It is important to link both formal (promotion, raise, confirmation) and informal awards (spot awards, RNR) to customer experience. Behaviour consistent great customer experience must be rewarded.

Framework for delivering exceptional customer experience!

Customer centricity gets spoken about a lot, don’t believe me? Tune in to any corporate briefing and you’d invariably find executives speak highly and passionately about customer focus, customer experience, and how they find 'excellent service delivery' to be central to their business strategy. Take a brief moment and do your own brief research first, resume going through this article after that.

You back? 

Thank you, know that you are very welcome here!

Tell me, did you not find the observation that I made about organisations uttering ‘customer centricity’ valid? Let’s take this experiment a little further to validate the claims made by these corporations. This research doesn’t have to be extensive or exhaustive. Just take a mental note of the brands that you searched, earlier. You’re most likely to find that these brands, which appear so similar in their assertions on the need to build a customer-centric organisation, seem vastly different, disjointed, and staggered all over the place, in reality, don't they?

Why might that be, you may ask?

If I may borrow from the seminal book on customer service,"Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business”, written by the tremendously talented duo, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine- No department or single individual does anything intentionally to inconvenience the customer but it is the collective effect of the unconnected, unintegrated and ununderstood actions that cause customers to sometimes get exposed to sub-optimal versions of the organisation. (** I’ve paraphrased from memory, this is not an exact quote from the book)

Organisations, nowadays are increasingly becoming complex, encompassing and encapsulating all manners of diversities and differences to cater to a wide range of and ever-evolving customer needs and desires. In an unforgiving hyper-competitive market organisations are forced to blindly chase their growth targets with maniacal focus and in doing so, in more cases than not, customer-centricity becomes the first casualty. Successful organisations are those that do not let aspiration of growth interfere with their commitment to delivering stellar customer satisfaction, look at Amazon, Apple, Zappos, Hyatt etc.

There is merit in understanding what are the elements that separate these spectacular successes from the forgettable failures. Or in other words, how does one weave customer obsession into the very fabric of their organisation? What are those building blocks that leaders should lay, own and put a lot of effort and focus into preserving? Having spent a lifetime in the customer services industry, I can tell you that - there is as much science in getting customer experience right as there is art in it. I like to think of building customer obsession, as a two-part process. 

1. Disciplines that go into making an excellent customer experience machine.

2. Tacts to building pervasive customer obsession.

# 1: Disciplines

Outstanding customer service departments must focus on organising their efforts around the below three aspects of its set up, with precision and passion.  

• Mechanics of service: It is about getting the arithmetic of the department right. 

• Demand estimation (forecasting): What is the expected volume of service, use historical trends from either your own organization or from your competitors to create a demand chart/flow.

  
  

• Staffing: Taking into account the time needed to handle each class of transaction that customers reach the corporation for, combined with service level aspirations (95/5). Derive from them the kind of support hour that will be required to be made available and therefore how many support staff must be onboarded and of what skillset.

  
  

• Tech stack: Omnichannel/CRM/Social Media stack and physical infrastructure that needs to be augmented to make the support desk functional.

  
  

• Training: Support staff without a proficient understanding of the products and the services that they are to support, will not be able to deliver an excellent customer experience. Hence, intelligent knowledge management systems and practices will need to be developed and operationalized.

  
  

• Quality management: You need to be able to measure if the intended level of service is actually being delivered, and there comes the quality management practices and systems. Shortfall identified by the quality function becomes the input for the training function. 

  
  

• Purpose of the department: This is about getting the philosophy of the department right.

  
  

• Service philosophy: What is the kind of service that the organisation aspires to deliver, it is this question that needs answering. Is there a specific service model of their own that the organisation is pursuing or do they wish to get inspired by another successful service model? From the clarity of service philosophy, emerges details of the kind of capital and OPEX investment that is required to be made in order to enable delivery.

  
  

• Service design: Service design is laying bricks to make the agreed service philosophy come about. It involves ascertaining the process, the platform, the technology and the people that will have to be brought together to realise the service aspiration. 

  
  

• Long-term objective: The measure of success must be determined in advance so that teams can work backwards from it. You could look at the metric that you like, NPS, CSAT, Churn, Repeat Buy, Life-time value of a customer etc. Choose the metric that compliments your overall business strategy well and then optimise your service design for it.

  
  

• Usefulness: On a scale of 1 to 5, how useful would you want your service to be? Customer effort is the metric here. Simply put, how easy or hard is it for the customer to transact with you.

  
  

• Operational efficiency: Benchmark level performance.

• What will you measure? : Operational excellence is key to success. Input metric measurement is being spoken about here. How many people are needed, how long will they take to work on something, how can the time be shortened etc? Process re-engineering routine will have to be adopted to make sure that the delivery mechanism improves continually. 

  
  

• Define target and tolerance: How good is good enough for you? Set targets for every measurable metric that you can think of, define control limits. So that process can be optimised to operate within it. Remember, lesser the variation, tighter the control, and better the experience. 

  
  

• Reward and penalty: Score-card approach is a good way to approach it. Organizations need to define clearly what level of performance they consider reward worthy and the levels at which they think it right to impose a penalty. 

  
  

• Consequence management: Details approach and process documentation to handle exceptions, on every aspect of the service operation. 

  
  

# 2: Building blocks of customer obsession: In this section, we will try to explore the science of building a customer-obsessed culture by talking about its 6 building blocks.

• Customer effort Index: We briefly touched upon it in the earlier segments too. The point that is being made here is that various departments come together to make customer experience happen, therefore, it is important to work with stakeholders to reduce customer effort. The idea is to make availing service or using the product so simple, so seamless and so straightforward and so intuitive that the customer doesn’t have to think before using the service.

  
  

• Anticipating customer need: Careful study of the customer data to preempt customer needs and then work towards meeting them. Latent, unfulfilled needs of the customers are being spoken about here. If we can devise a way to find out what is it that the customers would want next, we can make the thing available even before the customer needs it.

  
  

• Customer feedback: Device the framework for collecting customer feedback, they are the most valuable piece of information that a brand can hope to lay its hands on. Study them intently to take cues on the process and product refinement. Use customer feedback to understand the need Vis-a-vie the capacity of the product and service to meet the customer better.

  
  

• Creating “WOW”: Creating breathtaking and memorable experiences for the customers should be the only goal of the organisation. Make sure that this expectation is understood and people responsible to create these experiences are empowered with resources to do so.

  
  

• A set-up that exceeds expectations: What is great today, will be good tomorrow and just about ordinary the day after, to keep ahead in the race, the organisation needs to keep raising the bar of service. Devise newer methods to meet the customers where they are and to deliver them whatever it is that they expect from you.

  
  

• Let the customer know that they are your number one priority: #1 responsibility of the leaders in an organisation is to make sure that customers remain at the front and centre of every decision, every consideration, and every plan that is ever made. Bring the focus of every organisational process back to the customer, evaluate everything from the point of view of the customer and you will get there.

  
  

Remember, there are a billion known approaches to success in business, not taking good care of your customers, is not one of them.

Go out there and create memorable experiences!

Good luck!

Service Design for B2B customers.

We discussed the intricacies of B2C service design in the last essay, thank you indeed for receiving it so well - it was read 11K times in the last week, a number I am appeased with. I have been getting request emails since to address the same topic for the B2B (business to business) universe. So here I'm .. your wish is my command.

Let me begin this by posing a question for you.

Who buys a Rolex to see time?

The right answer for a vast majority of people who can't afford the watch is likely to be: No one.

The right answer for those who buy a Rolex to go with their Rolls Royce is likely to be: Well, I do. It is a fine timepiece.

Somewhere between these two different islands lies the water in which the dolphins of the B2B universe come to play. The popular view on service is that it naturally applies to B2C engagements better. Well, that is because it is an easier frame for people to imagine: a corporation serving a customer. If you think (deep thought) you would understand that there can't be a B2C without a B2B. Let me take an example of the ITES industry (as it puts food on my table, currently). For a BPO A to serve the end consumer of brand B, it is important that it serves Brand B well first because a disgruntled brand B, will cause the relationship to end abruptly, leaving no room for the end customer to be served.

The goal of both efforts (B2C and B2B Service Design) is the same.

Increasing comfort and convenience and reducing effort, thereby making the experience pleasant. It is vital to note here that, unlike a B2C arrangement in which the customer more often than not has limited resources and time to invest in changing supplier, in the B2B engagement it is literally someone's job to see if a relationship is serving the business interests. Someone assessing you 8 hours a day every day. 

Needless to say, you gotta deliver better.

So in the equation of service design with the core delivery and economic imperative, a whole lot of other considerations make entry too, listing a few here:

• The search, who can provide the same level of service cheaper?
  • Is there a provider who would provide better service for the same price?
• How do they (service provider) operate as an organisation, does it inspire confidence?
• Do I dislike the person, I interact with in the service provider organisation?
• Can changing this partner add to my equity within my organisation?
• By supporting them (service providers) will I be seen colluding with them?
• They don't pay me, I am paid by my organisation so I should make sure in the face of a conflict the one who pays for the invoice wins, which is my employer.

How does one deal with these complexities and come out as a winner, is the question?

Covid has not particularly helped the situation get any better.

The key to winning is to know your customer well and give them reasons beyond financial fitment to remain in a business relationship with you. The follow-up question is how do we do it?

It is important for us to find a way to meditate on below three aspects, with an extreme sense of urgency.

1. Are we giving enough reasons for the B2B clients to continue doing business with us in these stressed times? If so, what are those: quantified.
2. How is specific work that we execute on behalf of our client projected to be in short term (0-90days)?
3. How strongly are the clients placed to continue in their operation and in relationship with us?

Extended lockdowns and weak productivity have substantially reduced the goodwill of efforts put in to ensure business continuity.  The toil of making the computing infrastructure, software platform and the employee (though in a reduced capacity) available for operation, is when scrutinised with objectivity, comes out to be an effort guided to secure self-sustenance of the service provider: self-preservation. You see if a service provider doesn't work, they go belly up. Therefore continuity can’t be seen or quoted as a differentiator.

A framework to provide the service providers with a basis for initiation of measured and informed action to meet the below objectives is needed.

1. Secure short-term and medium-term fiscal interest.
2. Create authentic short and medium-term projections.
3. Categorise risk exposure on the clients.
4. Evolve solution offering so that it remains relevant in the changing landscape of business and related operation.
5. Create exit plans on high-risk relations and adjust the cost accordingly.
6. Make investments in areas that are to remain positive.

There are four structural elements in the framework that I would like to put forth. The service provider should collect qualitative data/intel from their B2B clients on these.

1. Who is your customer/client?
2. What is the client busy with these days?
3. How are they planning to engage with their end customers?
4. What experience principle are they contemplating at the moment?

Let's explain these building blocks.

Who is your customer/clients?

The objective is to create personas for the clients so that we better understand the nature of our clients and the ways in which they are coping up with the turbulences of their business. In our qualitative input collection, we have to ensure the below.

1. Contextual research to develop a deep understanding of the client.
   1. What is the need of the client business in the current times, from us and from their paying customers?
   2. What actions are they taking to secure their needs?
2. What is the symbolic image of the service provider in the minds of the clients?
   1. Do they view us as key strategic partners?
   2. Do we have a role to play in restoring normalcy at their end?
   3. Is the crisis helping us upgrade our standing in their assessments?
3. Who are the other partners that they are doing business with?
   1. What is going to be the impact on those relationships?

What are the clients busy with, these days? 

The Pandemic has brought about a change in the routine and expenditure of all organisations. While some spending is still being done a lot of the cash outflow has been wilfully stopped or greatly restricted. From a set of activities that are being performed, when we collect the subjective input, we can determine the below.

1. Perspective.
   1. What have they gone through?
      1. What are they doing about it?
2. Dreaming.
   1. Which are the areas in which they have placed their aspirations into?
3. Planning
   1. What has been their business continuity plan at an org level?
   2. What does the restoration look like?
4. Purchase.
   1. Have they made a significant purchase recently at an org level?
      1. Acquisition?
      2. Major investments?
5. Experience.
   1. What steps have they taken to shape the experience of the below important stakeholders in their business, in this crisis?
      1. End customer.
      2. Employees.
      3. Vendors.
6. Review/ Sharing.
   1. What kind of public perception are they trying to build for themselves through the interactions that they have with their end customers?

How are they planning to engage with their end customers?

1. Value creation happens at the point of interaction between the brand and the customers. In the knowledge of this principle, we need to start becoming present in the medium in which they are willing to conduct these exchanges.
   1. Mobile Application: What is the thrust of the change? Learn and adjust.
   2. Website: How is the website changing? What is it trying to become?
   3. Physical visits: What is the message that the brand is sending out? From the promises that they are making will emerge your business opportunity.

What 'experience principle' are they contemplating on?

Organisations within all the limitations of the market and their own cash flow constraints will have to return to full-scale operation assisted either by fresh capital infusion by means of borrowing or other methods like sale of equity for additional capital, etc. When they do so they will need to devise a strategy for functioning wrt.

1. Value preservation
2. Growth within the segment
3. Expansion
4. Diversification

We need to understand which way are they going so that we adjust our collective post-COVID plans accordingly.

1. Exploration based.
   1. Are they planning to venture into new market segments geographically, demographically or in-class/price segment?
   2. Communal.
      1. Are they planning to milk the existing customer base to cross and upsell other service offerings?
   3. Hospitable.
      1. Are they planning on parting with some portion of their revenue to re-kindle loyalties within their customers?
   4. Local.
      1. Are they expected to get local or hyper-local? Is contraction their game plan?

Who in our (service providers organisation) should do it?

1. These strategic inputs have to be collected at an operational level. Therefore, the deep links within the client ecosystem should be put to use.
2. Sales and Operation leads are required to conduct this exercise for all the active customers/clients.
3. These have to be collected somewhat covertly, I do not need to tell you why.
4. A very high degree of integrity and sincerity will have to be displayed in conducting this exercise. Actively fight with the natural push of applying +ve bias to input.
5. A +ve report if it eventually meets with the -ve outcome; the world will know that in the exercise we lost objectivity and as a result added overheads.
6. Absolute confidentiality should be maintained in this task therefore delegation of work is not to be done.

If we succeed in conducting this exercise well, we will have all the inputs needed to base our service design on. To know what are the elements of service design, read the article published last week.

(Link to the article: https://www.lavkush.co.in/2021/06/service-design-for-indian-customer.html )

I must however point out that the distinction between a B2C and B2B is stark. In a B2C endeavour, we devise and design for groups of customers but in B2B set up we design for each customer separately. Personalisation pays better dividends in B2B.

At the cost of repetition, let me say: there is no B2C without B2B.

At all times keep your B2B clients updated on both your intentions and tangible actions that you are taking and are planning to take to make their run pleasant with you.

Go design!!

Most importantly, do get vaccinated and take very good care of yourself.

Service design for Indian consumers!

 Plain sight is almost always anything but plain.

“If you happen to be wearing red glasses then red flags do not appear RED!”, said a wise man, nearly a decade ago. (Trivia, find out who said it)

The point of invoking this is to say that ‘knowing’ the way things are, is not a naturally occurring phenomenon or even a process. Knowing is a deliberate act. Many a time we get separated from reality by our own biases, beliefs and past experiences. We unknowingly often miss and sometimes even misread the signals present right in front of our eyes. Neither youthful exuberance nor arrogant assertion helps us reset the view as well as failure does. The failure, which comes out of the ‘I know it all" attitude.

Enquiries guided at gaining knowledge about a subject, thing, concept, group of people or a set of circumstance can’t begin until the bearer accepts that those are things that he does not know well enough. Efforts invested in the discovery of knowledge enrich our understanding and from following our resolve, we gain strength. Whilst, many agree that these fundamental principles apply to most walks and disciplines of life, many take these to be especially applicable in the context of customer service. We intend to expand on the very theory today.

‘20 years ago, the act of answering a customer on the phone within 5 minutes of wait time (The time between customer latching on the helpline number and a representative answering the call.) and then an assurance to remedy the issue in 10 business days would have been considered the gold standard of service. Contrast that with what might be categorised as supreme service today.

Do you realise the point that I am trying to make? You might expect me to ride on the wave of technological advancement, to surf around Omnichannel discussion and to throw in the mix axiom like ‘retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one’ etc. But I won’t do that. Instead, I would like to focus on the nature of the beast we call the great Indian customer. A group, all of us are a part of.

I would like to put stress on, knowing the customer, beyond the categories that are populated in a spreadsheet based on usage, age on the network, net worth and other transactional markers but by a more fundamental predisposition - the consumer behaviour, as a subset of human behaviour. And to make it work understanding the motivations and the nature of the customer is perhaps the most important thing to get right. While no form of generalisation can ever capture the true sense of the various types of customers that a brand can expect to find in a continent-size country, India. Some categorisation will have to be agreed upon for ease of this discussion.

From the collective expression of behaviour around buying we can safely take these four characteristics out.

1. India is a time rich and resource-poor country.
2. Trust deficit runs really deep in the country.
3. Typecasting customers one way or the other is not the wisest thing to do because the same person behaves differently in different contexts.
4. Offline purchase is still huge in the country.

Let’s go over them, one by one, in some detail.

Time rich and resource-poor country

• On per capita income India ranks 33rd and 2nd on population - I hope you get the point. We have too many people with too little wealth.
• To understand it a little better, remember last time you were in a mall, you saw way too many people just loitering around without making any purchase? We’re so good at ‘Window shopping’ that if it were a category in the Olympics we would have bagged gold every single time. According to a survey for every one person making a purchase as many as 6 are present in the shop who do not buy.
• We’re a country in which people wait in queues to avail small discounts, drive kilometres to attend the sale of grocery. Buying the product that we want at the cheapest price is an art that this country has perfected.
• India is among the most discount spammed countries in the world because, here merely mentioning the word, ‘discount’, ‘off’ or ‘free’ will get you eyeballs.

So when you are deciding your service strategy keep that in mind. Well, this does not mean that because Indians are not short on time, one can make them wait. Making a customer wait is one of the stupidest things to even think about, must be avoided at all costs. The reason for mentioning it here was to make you aware of the motivation and the driving force behind a customer making a choice in the country.

Lack of trust is deep.

• Do you wonder why most advertisements/Commercials in India do not talk about the product at all, but how the product will elevate the ‘prestige’ of the buyer? Ads highlighting feature of a product is as rare as finding sense, news or even a true fact on Republic TV.
  • Advertisement for wall paint - Does not speak about how good the paint is, but how the pain will make the neighbours jealous and the passers-by take a note of the house.
  • Jewellery ads - Speaks about strengthening domestic relations more (women bonding, couples coming closer ) and less about the core quality of the precious metal or its design prowess.
• This sounds too good, ‘what is the catch’? Don’t we hear it way too often? It is just hard for someone born and brought up in India to naturally trust something, without doing their own set of due diligence. Indian people are not bad, we are just poor. Lack of resources has been found to be indirectly proportional to the sense of trust.

To overcome this just do something nice and honest without any hidden terms or leading exercise for the customer and chances are that they will never forget you.

Do not typecast customers.

• Any given customer in India exhibits different traits when they are shopping for these segments.
  • Shopping for self.
  • Shopping for a life partner.
  • Shopping for children.
  • Shopping for parents.
  • Shopping for social events.
  • Shopping for professional ground in social events.
• The shopper may skimp on things that they purchase for themselves but when they do so for their kids, and their parents, they behave differently. They are willing to go right at the top of their buying capability. When you estimate buying capacity of the Indian customer, think about these dynamics.

So the thing to do is not just looking at the behaviour but also the contests in which the purchase is being done, or a service is being requested for.

Most of the country is still offline.

• PVR published some of these numbers a year and a half ago.
  • Nearly 54% of all its booking still happen over the counter.
  • 84% of these bookings happen 30 minutes before the showtime.
    • Corroborate this with the earlier example of people loitering around in the shopping complex that we spoke about. They form their audiences, mainly.

What this tells us is that even at the urban centres, where PVRs are, more than half of their purchases are offline and that too highly driven by impulse, so when you’re trying to solve a problem do not get blinded into believing that everyone behaves as you do, take this movie viewing example, as a marker of difference. Having said that, it is absolutely ok, should you want to only focus on those who book from an application and then land at the show.

In light of these facts, we can think about including these in our service design.

Be on the display

• The customers will need to get a real feel of what is it that you offer up and close before they choose to trust you with their money; so try and be as available and be so comprehensively as possible. The customer should see you as an approachable brand, aspirational and yet attainable. Meet the customer wherever they are.
• Brand communication should not alienate any section of society.
• Let people know that you're there to serve them all.

Transparency

• A trust deficient country can be won over by transparency. Organise yourself in a manner that there remains nothing to be found by an over-enthusiastic customer whose life mission is to find out what you may have hidden.
• Keep no hidden clause.
• Bring in the open, everything that is there to be offered.
• In making schemes/offers sound incredible and unbelievably amazing do not hide the portion of reality from the communication that could take the lustre away from your message. If there are such facts, know that your offer is not good for your long term business interest.
• When you do make a boo boo accept it and say sorry unconditionally. Do not defend or deflect.
• Be out there for your customers and when you do walk the extra mile, do so without expecting the customer to do something in return, for it. Customer effort has to be minimised, at all cost.
• Just be nice, without a reason.

Personalisation is vital.

• Knowing, ‘what’ is probably not going to be enough. You need to know ‘why’ and ‘for who’ so that you can make the essence of the brand response be an informed one, one that is addressing the context too and not just the content of the request that the customer is making.
• Knowing the customer and his motivations in some detail will help you establish a special kind of bond with the customer, one which outlasts any other shortcoming that you might have in your proposition/offer. To know more is to serve better.
• Let the customer know that you care for the ‘reason’ for which they make the choices that they do. Let them know that you are with them in their decision totally and completely. Make sure that you through your actions make it clear that the brand stands right alongside the customer, in this and in every other endeavour.

Diversity is cool.

• Being present every step up the way and in every shape imaginable, way and form in which your customer expects you to be, is the real way to create the base from which your batch of brand loyalist will emerge.
• Do not think, that you know any segment well enough, keep exploring.
• Keep re-validating your stance. Data based decision making is key.
• The offline or less savvy customers would also be willing to pay you just as conveniently as the customer who is ready to reach you on a web platform. If you decide to provide the offline customer with just as much care as you display for the one who plays on the app. Do not differentiate between customers.

Most importantly, be on your guard from - ‘I know, what the customer wants’ syndrome.

“We know how the customers feel, what they need, want and desire, because we have been in the industry for so many years”; Whenever you come even close to this sentiment know what you’re about to make is an error of judgment, quickly take a step back and think again. Ask for more evidence, data, instances to revalidate, your prior knowledge.

In this ever-changing world, the customer is not static, either.

In your service design, you’ll need to be inclusive, understanding, compassionate and above all empathetic.

Go make this a memorable day for your customer!

Good luck and goodbye!

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.

Outsourcing 2.0, the future!

It is impossible to attempt predicting the future without taking history into account; the posterior view of linear time. The history of outsourcing is intensely integrated into the history of the growth of the modern business enterprise, many believe that it rose in the second half of the 19th Century. Historians and economists in the past fifty years have helped us to understand this sudden and prominent phenomenon of growth, one such legend is Mr. Alfred D. Chandler, do read his work. Much has been said regarding outsourcing in the past couple of years. This business practice has suddenly grabbed center stage attention and is now the focus of politicians, the press, companies, and workers alike. Organizations in the outsourcing space are also constantly applying thought to understand how should they reinvent themselves to remain relevant, as they face their toughest challenge in the present era. A business that found its existing space between the value difference of a rupee and a dollar (speaking strictly in the Indian context) initially and in not too much time became a darling even on a transaction that was between the same currency, faces an existential challenge now. The rationale for the rupee to rupee transaction came from the differentiation of core and non-core tasks for an organization. Offshoring, mainly from stronger currencies to the weaker ones flourished for the first decade, almost fanatically. India gained immensely from this fad that was catching up. IT and ITES provided employment to over 3 hundred thousand people, major businesses,  houses came into being: Wipro, Infosys, Concentrix, HCL, Tech Mahindra, and many others. Companies in the western world saw value in saving money and at the same time dealing with a race that was hardworking, ambitious, hungry for growth, and also particularly skilled for doing the job just right.

The growth and meaning of outsourcing are increasingly getting flatlined; cost pressures are driving the value down, from the perspective of the service providers. The political scene around the world is not helping either, mass protests in favor of keeping the jobs onshore have become common. Major political events in the recent past have revolved around it, the rise of President Trump, the ill effects of Brexit; the mounting of obscurantists and protectionists ideologies around the world have hurt the prospects of the thriving outsourcing industry in our country. Both IT and ITES have suffered immensely, we do not see too many new players making a move. But thankfully, all is not lost. India is growing, one could argue that it could have grown faster had a few things not happened, but then those are hypothetical arguments; we remain among the fastest-growing economies in the world. A new breed of entrepreneurs have come into the fray and are solving real issues interestingly applying technologies that are now available at a much cheaper cost, than it would have been let's say a decade ago. The eco-system is ready. Would Ola or Flipkart have become such spectacular successes in 1980ties in India? The answer to that question is a clear no. Now is the time for it and it is a great thing to happen to us as a country, society, and also the economy.

If the political climate was unfavorable and stunting the growth of outsourcing agencies vigorously, the advent of technology: penetration of internet, the rise of automation, AI and ML are together making it almost impossible for small players to exist. Jobs that required humans back then are being done in a few taps a lot more satisfyingly and swiftly. ITES providers are dying a slow death, many are bleeding profusely with no real sight of a breakeven, let alone profit and prosperity. Many renowned businesses have done away with their domestic business or are in the process of walking out, Sutherland &  Mphasis are classic examples. More than 40% of small and medium domestic BPOs had to shut shop, in the last 6 yrs. The scene is not all that good for those who aren’t comfortable with being on their toes all the time, either. There are organizations like Aegis, Karvy DigiKonnect, connectQ, 1point1, Megus, etc who are trying to walk in the opposite direction of the wind and have created for themselves results that are not bad, if not all that encouraging, in all the quarters of the year. But there is hope. And that is exactly what we are trying to discuss here.

A workforce that began with handling transactions on prescribed SOPs have in these years become rich in experience and now have valuable insight into how various businesses are conducted, not only have they mastered their game of efficiency but have also educated and trained themselves on the craft to a degree that they now carry invaluable perspicacity into the world of the consumers and deep understanding of the technology that makes the customer experience come about. Cross-pollination of talent has graduated the industry into a formidable group, one that is capable of rewriting the rules of the game. This development is part evolutionary and part forced and therefore, not easy for everyone to get to.



The time has come for the outsourcing industry to shed its dead weight of unskilled manpower, onboard forward thinkers, and retain only high performers; the average and the below-average must go. This industry has to prepare itself to walk out of the shadow of the transaction and shine in the light of experience. It is apt for the service providers to fight for increasing their share of influence, the only way for them to exist is if they muster the courage to secure a seat at the thought leadership table. A transition from a low value, labor-based output to a high-value intellect based outcome will have to be made. Service providers will have to become providers of knowledge and acumen and not just efficiency.



Doing the job, quicker, better, and at low cost is no longer lucrative, there is a need to invent ways to do them differently, trying different business solutions. The construct of the ‘different’ is in making the delivery consultative, one in which the providers do not only bring manpower but also industry acumen, knowledge of framing service philosophies, the capability of defining experience, designing its machinery, and then delivering results which are second to none. Technology is here to stay, providers will have to befriend the trend, work towards creating the capabilities of automation in-house, start offering a data first, and voice second service offering. The conventional mode of isolated support on voice, data, and chat channels will have to be united into an omnichannel environment, flexible enough to extend the customers the choice to choose: voice or text, self-help or assisted guidance, with solid CRM integration, one that is capable of building context and providing for predictive customer behavior. Service providers will have to become solution architects. The change will have to be welcomed into the organization and the way of its inner working. If I may borrow from Robin Sharma;



All change is tough at the beginning, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.



Here are a few things that service providers should do to transform.



De-age your leadership team - All of those 25 to 30 yrs + experience folks are good, they bring a lot of value but if they are made in charge of driving transformation, it wouldn't come about just as swiftly or effectively. You need to bring in a fresh perspective, bright and young people with the required skillset to populate your leadership team. Studies have shown that after a certain age and getting certain success in life the fire in the belly goes off for 98% of the people and that alone is a reason for you to look at your leadership team to see if you have such satisfied people around? If so, it's time for you to get people who relate to the change and have a better handle on contemporary settings and above all are willing to walk that extra mile and have the desire and the determination to make their mark.

Alter your service offering - Your service offering has to be a happy marriage between technology, business acumen, skilled manpower, and growth infrastructure. You’ll need to modify your solutions for them to make sense to the market and the customers that you wish to service. You need to be able to partner with the organization with which you are doing business with offerings, creating service strategy, forming the budget, laying the logical and physical service infrastructure, sourcing, training, execution - all of it. You need to take a leap from business process outsourcing into the realm of experience outsourcing.

Responsible billing model: Try to slowly move away from transaction billing to outcome-based invoicing. It is not going to be easy. Today you bill for transactions (calls/email/chat) you handle tomorrow you’ll charge on outcomes, let’s say a threshold of customer satisfaction, first, call resolution, churn %, repeat purchase, etc,  keeping the service cost below a certain limit for the exchange of x% of profit. I’m just saying. Commercial viability will have to be worked out but if service providers have to grow in the value chain they will need to value outcomes more than a transaction. And in the process will come into effect a high-performance culture because then the substandard outcome will mean substandard billing. Focus on performance will be much higher. And because it is a high-value job .. service providers will get to command much better prices.

Driving innovation as a core product: Organizations will have to increasingly invest in a thinking workforce, currently, the focus is only on doing (executing) which is why you have a mob of the unintelligent and the uninspiring, who are satisfied doing what they have always done, without thinking of finding different and better ways of solving the issue. Service providers will need to get creative, run of the mill thought processes will have to be now killed, deliberately. For the culture of ideation to thrive within the organization, leaders will have to reward thinkers, demonstrate a willingness to accept the nonnormal and above all, they will need to give the message that they value thinking as much as they value doing, if not more. Take up a few high-value high impact ambitious projects and run them so that the workforce has something to relate to.

Decentralize work (WFH): Cluttering the real state in today’s world is not only ineffective but also inefficient - the outsourcing industry will have to learn to ‘work from home’. A model that is a mixture of on-premise + Work from home has the capability of bringing the billing cost down with leaving larger room for service providers to expand profits, alongside creating a more independent, flexible, and happier workforce. I’m not even counting the environmental benefits of reduced vehicular traffic or saving of travel time, here. For far too long leaders have seen the outsourcing industry set up to be like manufacturing, that must change NOW!

Diversify into Tech Products: Voice can and should not be your only stream of revenue. You’ll need to create a 1st party tech platform/solution to survive.

Gartner says that by 2020 85% of the transaction will move to the unassisted category, the machine will take over man, we already see that reality manifesting itself in our day to day interaction with the world. If service providers do not invest in this critical adaptation now, they will soon be extinct.



On that note, I end this .. until we meet again.