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 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.

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.

Service Culture.

Between customer experience, culture & transformation I’ve written 10 articles (will list and link them at the end of this one) in last two years alone: collective views on organizational set up has also emerged as most liked and read category of all my articles, a close 2^nd being my thoughts on politics, history and social commentary on recent events. I’m not surprised by this at all, for the fact that after educational institutions the longest time that I’ve spent in any set up is organizational, various companies that I’ve had the good fortune of working with, therefore it is only natural that when I write about it ... people tend to spend more time on it. So, I thought, for my 2^nd last write up of 2018, I should take the count from an ordinary 10 to an auspicious 11; the most logical choice for the next and the last will be a social commentary; do come back for it.

I have written extensively about the benefits of promoting the right behavior and therefore setting the tone for culture to set in and hence to avoid the risk of repeating myself over I wouldn’t get into underscoring it again beyond saying that: We’re a collection of our habits, habits are formed by behaviors and these behaviors aggregated is a good representation of culture of the setup in which one expresses himself, verbally or by his deliveries. Therefore, it is vital to look at the culture at an incident level just as much as it is important to be looked at and understood at an entity level. Cultural signature becomes an inseparable part of one’s identity; it is true for a person, a family, an organization and also a country. We don’t say it as often, but we do assign a lot of importance to it; for instance, Finland is known for its quality education system, Singapore is known world over for its service mindset, Japan is often associated with loyalty and pride, America is torchbearer for individual liberties, England has heritage on its side and so on.

We’re in the process of seamlessly transitioning into a service economy from an agrarian one; manufacturing’s grip has been weakening over the course of last decade with our neighbor, China, making tremendous progress in low-cost mechanized manufacturing. Aggressive investments aren’t being made to boost India’s manufacturing capabilities either, under the current central regime we have observed year on year decline in the manufacturing index, over 80% of new money getting added to the economy is being pushed in the services sector; naturally, ‘service’ is becoming favorite of the business world. There is money to be made in it ... everyone is willing to jump in ... but do all succeed? You and I know, that it is not the case ... many are running in the race only a few will get to make it to the qualifiers, let alone getting any closer to one of the three medals that are there for them to grab. There comes the question ... which one will succeed and WHY?

Well, the answer is hidden in the premise of the question: Whichever organization succeeds in making service their working culture will walk away smiling with the trophy; everyone else will have to return unawarded from the show.  

What is service, really?

Service in its purest form is a selfless act(s) done to help others will no expectation of a return of any kind. Our setting is not charitable and therefore we will have to modify the definition a little to make it useable. Modified: Service is an act done for others with an intention of solving pain points of the customer (whoever is willing to pay is a customer, either today or in future) by extending convenience to leave him with the feeling of being cared and warm enough for him to return for more (repeat buy/business).

Phrases like – “customer centricity”, “from the perspective of the customer”, “the customer is the king”: are overused, mostly in the context of lip service. Very few, regard what they say in whatever they do. Customers get written about in fancy pamphlets and magazines, designed and drawn on creative posters but more often than not the message remains there. It doesn’t really get translated into real delivery. This failure is attributed singularly to the lack of the 'culture of service'. Leaders do not supply enough enablement... no real effort is made in shaping behaviors right. Don’t trust me? Open your current annual operating plan and try sighting an item called ‘service culture’ building in it? Chances are you will find toilet paper, tea bags included in the list of spends but not ‘culture building’? Am I wrong? Let’s get real here .. even soft aspects need resources. Things will not change because you find the idea warm .. things will change when you provide it with resources that will keep it warm and buzzing. Business leaders must make real efforts by throwing in the game some skin, invest money and time in building the culture right and then demand a return on it. For instance, if you’re looking at ending the year with a net profit of 18% without any dedicated expenditure on culture building, you should commit bucks to culture building and then demand 25% or perhaps, 30% from your leaders in return, if not in the first years in following years so sure. If real money is being invested it is justified to have a realistic expectation of return from it: Business 1.0.1, isn’t it?

Ever since I began my career as a front-liner, I dreamed of becoming a CEO, one day; I’ve made decent progress ... the run thus far has been exciting and God willing, I see myself becoming one in the near future (when and where is not quite known at the moment, but I’m confident, when the time is right opportunity will present itself). I often, think and journal, the lofty ideas and the idols that I’ve picked up from 283 books on management that I’ve read and from being in company of great business leaders, which ones will I implement first and how: No matter how many times I do the math in my head, creating a service culture in my organization comes right at the top of my list of priorities.  And to do that below are the three things that I think I’d like to do. When I’m saying this I must make it clear that these may not be the perfect set but one has to make a beginning somewhere and should it fail, the opportunity of course correction will always be provided by the strong intention of being successful in a meaningful way.

1.    Create a clear statement of intent: When you deal with large heterogeneous groups of people, you can rest assured of distortion, distraction and sometimes also degeneration among other great things that people achieve, there is the innate conflict between personal value systems and the choices that people make. Let me give you an example: For finding a satisfying meal someone on the Jain diet will look for a place which offers onion and garlic free food. On the very mission, someone on a non-vegetarian routine might love a garnishing of fried onions on their plate of fresh and warm chicken biryani. You see the purpose in both the cases is the same satiating hunger but people from two set of behaviors approach it in ways they find most suitable but unknowingly they are in stark conflict with one another. The organization is no different, such small mindless choices do cause a derailment and therefore a very clear, unambiguous statement of intent is required to be made ubiquitous. Way to do it, through AOP, yes I’d like a culture building spend as an item. Carefully chosen Vision, Mission, and Value charters.

2.    Review and Reiteration: Unlike with art & poetry business doesn’t have the luxury of time, it is always strapped for it, duty bound to move quicker than the competition on one end and nimble enough for the consumer on the other end. In the hustle of everyday, it is normal for people to miss the message, not everyone has been fitted with an IQ of 130+, only some of us have that gift and therefore .. missing is an everyday occurrence. Therefore, it becomes essential that with the outcome of the act, the intent is also reviewed just as thoroughly and regularly. Meaning, when you review a business units’ performance, you, of course, will see how well they did on the top and the bottom line, but you will also pose to the team additional questions to understand the intent. Why was a certain action taken, why was a certain product launched, price revised, hiring done etc to gauge accurately and objectively how well the thought process is aligned with the philosophy of the organization. Let not a misaligned intent hide behind results of either sparkling success or frustrating failures. Whenever you find a potential disconnect with the service mandate .. you will need to reiterate. Some will have to be momentary while others will necessitate a more structured intervention through, training, value improvement plans or leadership development sessions.

3.    Aligned & committed decision Making: You’ll have to prepare yourself to take tough decisions to protect your commitment to creating a culture of service, it could mean short-term loss in some instances, parting ways with business opportunities or favorite team members and even taking a strong view of one’s own conduct sometimes, here it is important to note that matches are not won in the ring but in the training grounds ( Remember the boxer Mohammad Ali?). If you are building for the future .. if you wish to be remembered then you will have to ACT in conformance, every single time. It is like the route of a drug addict after his rehabilitation, even one lapse could result in a complete reiteration of the addiction. You just can't slip .. not even once.

The generation that grew up on typewriters will end on palmtops that is amount of transformation that one has to go through in one lifetime, life of an organization is alike, it will need to keep reinventing itself to remain relevant and the “culture of service” as a commitment is worth becoming a constant cornerstone .. because business will exist so long as customers exist and so long as customer exists .. it will pay to love them obsessively hence the culture of service.

As promised, here is a link of other 10 articles written in 2017-18 on organizational setups. Thanks for your time and continued support!

1 - Customer Experience - It matters!

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2017/10/customer-experience-it-matters_28.html

2- Customer Feedback, should you care?

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2017/12/customer-feedback-should-you-care-enough.html

3- From service to “Customer Experience” !

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/07/from-service-to-experience.html

4- Service & Churn!

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/04/service-churn.html

5- Make hope your culture!

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/01/make-hope-your-culture.html

6- ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/09/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast.html

7 –Empathy & Organisations!

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/08/empathy-organisations.html

8- Before Innovation ..

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/09/innovation-why-and-how-is-article-that.html

9- Innovation : Why & How!

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2017/06/innovation-new-normal.html

10- Transform digitally, NOW!

Link : https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2018/11/transform-digitally-now.html