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Guest post

I have written a guest post on Ramesh's blog. Post is regarding Microsoft's struggle against its competitors and its way forward.

As usual looking forward for your point of view.

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Suggestions invited

I will be interacting with final year MBA students next week and topic of discussion will be 'First Day at Work' and 'Workplace Nuances'.

In case you have any personal experiences, anecdotes, video links, cartoons et al to share which can be used for illustration, you may leave a comment or email me at adeshsidhu@gmail.com

Come on folks, scratch your grey cells, go down the memory lane, dig out some hidden treasures and enrich the would be managers.

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Why so complex?

When I was a kid my Dadi used to give me Chayavanprash at the onset of winters. And I religiously used to take two spoons of Chayavanprash during the winters. As per my Dadi, Chayavanprash makes our body immune to various types of infections/ allergies and keeps us disease free in winters. Wikipedia confirms her wisdom.

 
As weather is changing and with swine flu hovering in India’s air, my Dadi again suggested to start having Chayavanprash. Like a good boy, I went to a chemist to buy Chayavanprash. I was looking for good old days product when we had a white jar with Blue or Red color top. Chemist showed me four-five variants of Chayavanprash except for the one that I was looking for. And every variant had  a different name.

One was Chayavanshakti.
There was Chayavanprakash.
Then there was sugar-free Chayavanprash.
There was also one more variant whose name I do not remember anymore.
But they do not have Chayavanprash.

“Ooph! What is the difference between all of these” I asked. “Nothing much. Everything is same and the difference is only in packaging” replied chemist.

I personally feel that Chayavanprash had one of the best positioning and was one of few brands which were known for their simplicity. It never had any exuberance, never had an excitement attached and buzz was something which was never associated with it. 
I think above were the reasons why my illiterate Dadi was able to identify with qualities attached with this brand.

But with these changing times, they have made this simple brand very complex. If I was so lost after seeing all these variants, my Dadi will surely be lost by miles and might say that the chemist does not sell genuine products!
I will adjust with time, to this complex world of Chayavanprash, but my Dadi will not be able to. Maybe they are trying to lure young customers and want to appeal to kids. But if nobody can differentiate between various brand extensions, it will be difficult to appeal to them as well.

As they say, it is always easy to make things complex and Chayavanprash makers has surely chosen an easy way out.   

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Treating prospective customers

During weekends, one of the biggest agenda for me is to decide where to eat and what to eat. This weekend also a decision is made to try out newly opened fine dining restaurant. As we reached, it turned out to be that restaurant was full. It was not only full but waiting period was of 45 minutes. The person in charge standing outside informed us about waiting time and asked us to come and try after that.

Well, we decided to whack our brains again and decided to check out another eating place in nearby market. After reaching, we saw lot of people waiting outside this restaurant too. As we approached the gate, people were sitting outside on chairs waiting for their turn and waiting time was 30 minutes. Manager asked us to sit outside and wait. After few minutes, while we were still waiting, we were given lemonade and that too complimentary.

I was impressed by second restaurant as they made me feel special while I was waiting to get in. This got me thinking on how their gesture of treating their prospective customers goes a long way in earning a customer. While the first restaurant was a fine dining restaurant situated in a mall and their target customer is upper middle class but their treatment to their prospective customers was pretty ordinary.    

In this age of cut throat competition, it is not enough to give special treatment to existing customers but it is also important how prospective customer is treated.

After all everybody wants to feel special.What say?

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Virtues that are impossible to find...

Few days back, I met a manager in one of the casual meetings and he was discussing his CEO’s working style. 

Key points that emerged were:

He shares information immediately with all concerned. He does not wait for any formal occasion or meeting and does not wait for sending an e-mail to share information, however small it may be. His sole agenda is to ensure information is passed onto respective stakeholders so that things keep moving smoothly.

He does a lot of informal meetings and chat sessions with his team members. His meetings are short and most of the time happen in cubicles of team members. No pre-scheduling of meeting times, and no blocking of meeting rooms. In case any data is to be seen, it happens at team member's PC only. No time wasted on presentations or excel sheets.

His favorite one liner is - pick up the phone and talk. I guess it is a simple but an effective thing to move things in any organization.

Another one liner which he is famous for – emails can wait but resolutions cannot. Rightly said, move things and not emails.

I was astonished to hear about the working style of this CEO. In this age of Internet, PowerPoint, Excel and Voice Mail, he still believes in keeping things simple.

All the above qualities are seen as virtues these days and it seems so difficult to follow these simple but yet effective ways of resolution.

Sounds interesting, right?

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Important things to do...

Below are things which I do daily in my office time. 

Meetings: - Most of the time participants crib about quality of snacks. In the end, the only thing achieved is next meeting’s time.
Conference calls: - Lots of us put phone on mute and wonder why I am doing this.
Video conferences: - After effect of recession and another form of meeting but there is distance involved between the participants. If you are lucky, at the most, decision is made for next VC.
Important calls: - One to one calls made to lots of people and fixing time for meetings, VC and conference calls.
More conference calls: - As if something we forgot to achieve in our last con calls. However, end result remains the same.
Then there is email: - Probably the biggest sucker of time. When not in a mood to do anything, simplest excuses is ‘send me the email and I will think about it’ and you can be at peace after that. 
 
Well, these are also my ways and means of wasting time in an organized fashion. 

Do you have anything to add this?

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Loyalty Programs...For What?

I am an avid reader and during weekends, I spend close to 2 hours in various book shops. I have loyalty membership card for a couple of book stores and recently I added one more of Om Book Shop as they have decent presence (in terms of number of stores) in Delhi. 

Last weekend, I bought a couple of books on sale and while billing, I informed the cashier that I have membership card. “It is of no use as you are already buying books which are on sale”, replied the cashier. “So, what?”, I asked curiously. “As you already have discount on your purchase, we cannot add points to your bill”.  

Is membership card are all about projecting discounts, I asked myself? 

This is not one off case. At most of the places, membership card is either projected as a medium of giving discounts or extending offers. I agree customers lap it up because they are lured by extra benefits , but loyalty cards can serve lot bigger purposes to a retailer than extending discounts. 
Loyalty cards, as the name suggests, are there to build loyal customer base, to build relationship with existing customers, to treat regular customers so well that they become your brand ambassadors and to help in building loyalty that span a lifetime. Tesco is known for doing this so well. They use their loyalty data to understand consumer behavior and tailor-make offers and promotions according to taste of their loyal customers.  

I guess Indian retailers still have a long way to go as far as using loyalty cards effectively is concerned. If implemented and used well, loyalty cards can be the reason for a customer's coming back to store. 

As usual, your point of view is welcome.

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The Law of Small Contribution


Small things can make lot of difference. 

My office does not have dedicated parking place inside the office complex and I have to park my car in  thepublic car parking. Initially, like all parking wallahs, he is difficult to deal with.

Do not park here. Park your car in other corner of lane. You have parked in wrong slot. Give me change as I do not have change.  

Blah. Blah. Blah... the list goes on. 

But with time, he started recognizing me and realized that I am his regular customer. Slowly, his list of don’ts decreased. Ultimately, he got rid of his whole list.  

Then I started to see the other side of his personality. He started blocking parking space for my car near my office. I now come at my regular time; drive straight to my ‘allotted’ parking space. No more hassles for change, in fact he has started giving me discount. Instead of charging regular price of Rs 20, he charges me Rs 10. I am not the only one for this kind of special treatment; he tries to give this kind of treatment to everyone in our office.  

I am surprised to see other side of his personality. 

With this small change, parking wallah’s almost customized the parking slots based on individual preference. 

This I call as Law of Small Contribution as his minimum contribution made lot of difference to my parking experience. And this law makes a lot of difference in customer service and customer experience.

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Signage says it all

 
 

I came across this signage yesterday in one of high street markets in Delhi. 
There are very few innovations by Indian retailers when it comes to signage. At most of the places we see some posters with a lot of words on them which fail to cut the clutter.
However, I found this signage brilliant and bold that it stands out and catches your imagination immediately. I found this whole concept simple but very effective. 
The number of words used are minimum as picture drives home the most important message i.e. Kazo has men’s range as well. 
Though they could have done this job a little better by not putting 33% Sale offer in front of this innovative signage. Here's a link to some more innovative and interesting posters and billboards.

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Problem ownership and WOW! experience



On a New Year’s Eve, one of my team members got a call from a customer wishing her a Happy New Year.  She did not recognize the customer in first instance but after the customer told her complete incident, she recognized her.  
Apparently, the customer had to struggle a lot to get her concern resolved until she got in touch with my colleague. My colleague helped her in getting her concern resolved. And the customer remembered this act of hers and related her interaction as a WOW moment. This is why she decided to call her on New Year Eve and give her wishes. 

What made this interaction stand out? I think the problem solving approach of my colleague. I agree it is her job to resolve the customer’s concern but she could have easily passed the buck to some other entity, department, person or whatever. So many times we have seen and observed that people simply pass the buck and do not own the problem. With no one taking ownership, customer’s frustration increases and thus the chances of providing great customer experience is lost.  

In a report published by Knowledge @ Wharton emphasis is on this point. The report examines the ways and means of providing wow experience in retail stores to customers. Biggest challenge faced by retailers is lack of problem ownership.  
Courtney stresses it is important for retailers to have a clear, simple problem resolution process. "The biggest issue is problem ownership," she says. "If all you can do is train everybody on one thing related to problem-solving it would be getting people to own the problem and not pass it off." Hoch says that while problem resolution was not as great a factor as some of the other five elements, one common thread emerged from the research: "A person stepped up to the plate and figured out how to solve the problem." Having that experience changed the consumer's state of mind from helplessness to, "'Boy, somebody came up and helped me.' We all like a hero, but it doesn't happen very often," Hoch notes.

Every retailer can have best quality products and can create great ambiance, but it is the small gestures that make a difference.

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Hope sells


On way to Sangla, there is a small temple on the road side called Taranda Maa Mandir. Every vehicle on its way to or from Sangla stops at this mandir and the travellers pray at this temple. 

People pray and hope that they complete their journey safely. Once they reach safely, their faith starts building in the mandir. More number of safe journeys and faith gets stronger.  

In the whole process, they start sharing their experience with others. They also listen to others, who also echo same kind of faith in mandir. After numerous such safe journeys faith is established permanently. But this whole process has taken years to establish. 
 
For ages, marketers have been selling hope.  

Consumers try new products in a hope that it will fulfill their want or need. In a hope that product will make their life simpler. In a hope that product will change their life. Once hope is a fulfilled, customer develops faith in the product. This is the tricky part. This is also the difficult part.  
Products are sold on hope but brands are built on faith. Faith gets stronger when people share their experiences with others and others echo same sentiments about the product. This requires lot of patience. This also takes a lot of time. This also means products continue to deliver value that is expected out of them. This is not easy, but if it can be established, nothing more is there to worry about. 

Selling hope is easy but building faith is difficult.

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Sunday tit-bits

Sleeping on job is more productive, reports this article.

The world is quickly waking up to the power of the nap. In New York, wellness centre Yelo rents private sleeping cabins out at $22 per 30-minute nap. At Munich Airport, a solution called Napcabs offers glowing sleeping stations for about 15 euro an hour. And in Japan where not working is not cool, executives slip away to napping salons or tight 2m x 1m x 1.25m spaces in capsule hotels to snore.
A good interesting read.

Another inspirational and informative article about Narayana Murthy's thoughts on leadership, running Infosys and some other business aspects.

You need leaders who are courageous because you need leaders to dream big, you need courage of conviction, you need courage to take bold steps when there are so many naysayers. Second, you must have high learnability because you have to take decisions quickly (snaps his fingers). Third, you must be able to communicate reasonably well, because leadership is all about creating a wonderful image of [the] future of the company and unless you can communicate reasonably well, you cannot rally, get behind people. Third, you must have a good value system and you must lead by example, because without [a] value system people won’t buy your dream. Leaders must be confident, which is the ability to admit I could be wrong, it is the ability to recruit someone smarter than me, it is the ability to participate in team work. Leaders must be human, in other words they must show emotions and not hide mistakes, they must not seem synthetic or flawless.


Hopefully you will enjoy these as much as I did. 

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United breaks the guitar

This video is funny and highlight the poor customer service rendered by United Airlines. Dave's guitar was broken by United Airlines staff and airline refused to give repair charges to him. He followed with airlines for close to nine months and then hit upon the idea of recording songs about his ordeal and put it on YouTube.com. Song became instant hit.



After the damage has done, United Airlines budged. They have also decided to include this video as a training module.

I think they are little late in accepting their mistake and damage has already been done.

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Recession-era effect

Recession has impacted three things majorly - employees, brands and consumers. 
Recession changed the way consumers spend their money. It changed the way consumers shop.
Recession also changed the way brands see themselves. More and more brands are projecting themselves as value brands.  

Recession also changed the way employees look at their jobs. Job market has become employers market wherein high salaries are difficult to come by. 
I have jot down few characteristics which define recession-era employees, consumers and brands. 
Recession-era employees
  • No increments required
  • Ready to do the job of 2 or may be 3 employees
  • If need be, ready to take pay cut
  • Job profiles does not make any difference
  • Networking, interpersonal skills are in reckoning
  • Job security – what the heck it is?
  • Working conditions are a myth and hard work is all that counts
Recession-era consumers 
  • Vice like grip on purses
  • Plastic cards are lying unused in some corner
  • Learning to live hand to mouth
  • Second hand stuff is good but free is best
  • NO to any new loans
  • Postponing all unnecessary purchases
  • Paying EMIs is biggest concern
Recession-era brands
  • We sell cheap
  • We are cheaper
  • We are the cheapest
  • We give products free
  • ????
Your suggestions are welcome.

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Friends...


The other day I was having a conversation with my friend who was seeking some kind of information on cars. I told him proudly that one of my blogger friends is a car enthusiast and we can seek his opinion. “In this changing world, our categories of friends are increasing by every passing day. The life is becoming amazing.” He replied. 

I was hit by the word ‘categories of friends’. I thought about these categories of friends and decided to jot down. As I started to think, my list of friend categories went up to 8.    

My list is as below (not in any particular order): 
Running friends – Friends whom I meet once in a month for a 10 KM run. All are amazing people but our conversation starts with a run and ends with run. We have exchanged our phone numbers, email IDs but most of the conversation revolves around preparation of next run. 

Drinking buddies – We get together once in a week or once in two weeks and drink ‘away to glory’. We discuss everything under the sun. We try to remain in touch. Most of our drinking programs are made and finalized just a day before actual ‘event’. 

Blogger friends – We share knowledge, help each other and stay regular in touch through blogs.
 
Other Social Network friends – Huge list of friends and connections on Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn wherein my friend’s friend is also my friend. But it stays there only. 
College friends – Some good college friends who care to stay in touch or with whom I wanted to stay in touch.  

School friends – Same as above 

Elevator friends – These are my friends whom I meet regularly or irregularly in elevator. We exchange Hellos and generally discuss jobs, life, weather and society. Meeting time is less – sometimes as less as 20 seconds but fruitful.
Office friends – Need not to write much. Most of the conversations revolve around office happenings only.   

Family friends – These are friends which are passed on to me by my parents. I do not know them well but need to ‘mark my attendance’ whenever required.  
When I was a kid, I used to have a best friend, some good friends and then the rest. This was a kind of trend with everyone at that time. I knew this small set of friends very well. I knew their choices of games, and their choices of toys.  I knew their parents also. Their brothers and sisters were my brothers and sisters as well.  

The number of friends was less but all of them were special. They were like extended ‘me’. 
Above listed friends are special in their own ways but the domain of friendship is limited. Each category a small extension of my personality. 
Please do share if you also have similar kind of friend categories.

 

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Blame the leader

In Army there is a saying, praise publicly, rebuke privately.  

I realized the importance of this saying on this weekend when I visited a book store called Landmark. I noticed that a person in authoritative position (may be a store manager or area manager) was standing in the middle of store and asking all his supervisors and sales representatives to meet him. Apparently, some employees had left the store without making entry in a designated register. This did not go down well with the person in position. He decided to give verbal warning to all present employees by standing in the middle of the store. Though he was not shouting at his employees but it was not hard to make out that he was giving all his peace of mind to helpless employees. The long faces of employees showed all the signs of dejection, low motivation and state of being. 

The look on the faces of employees said it all.  

In retail stores all sales representatives are paid peanuts. They work in extreme hard conditions. They come to stores early and they stay late. They do mundane tasks like cleaning and dusting. They stand whole day and they have no time for rest. They also do most important task – interact with customers. After working so hard, appreciation rarely comes their way. And spanking, they get in public.  

I am sure it is difficult to expect good customer service from such dejected employees. And whom to blame? I think the leader. 
What's your take? 

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Shame on you


Read this tweet yeasterday. I assume this is from a customer service representative.

This is sad. I am sure nobody is forcing this guy to work in customer service department. He can always quit and work in some other cool and relaxed job where he won't be bothered by customers on his holiday. Shame on you for bringing bad name to your employer.

I will never like to work with people like him.

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Twitter and customer service



You have a complaint against a brand or service. You tried contacting customer service but nothing happened. You wrote an email to customer service department but nothing happened. You sent a reminder but it did not help much. And you feel helpless, dissatisfied with this 'take it or leave it' attitude of companies. But hey, wait. Help is pouring in from new channel. Twitter. 
More and more number of people are using Twitter to register their complaints. Good thing is that they are getting responses and resolutions from their service providers. And Help pours in faster. 

Article in NY Times reports 
As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.
  
More and more number of brands have started using Twitter to promote their promotions, to connect better with customers and to monitor conversations. Since they are on it, they are also able to hear positive and negative feedback about their service and brand.     

Reason cited for this kind of service is viral nature of Twitter. Every Twitterer (I think I invented this word) worth his salt has some number of followers to whom they retweet their grievance and thus bad word spreads. They not only get help but they get it in record time. On one instance, a person spent 30 minutes on phone with call centre representative but no resolution provided. After that he tweeted his concern and he got resolution in 19 minutes! 

It is sad to see that after spending huge amount of money on call centre technologies, buying best of CRM systems, hiring best of the customer service representatives and building state of the art offices, companies prefer to put their efficiencies behind a free service.

Is Twitter going to revolutionize customer service? I do not think so. Right now it is new tool and most of the companies are testing waters. In most of the companies it is in a project stage where it is being monitored by marketing directors, customer service heads and hence faster responses. Once a process sets in, it will follow the path treaded by other high profile technologies. And customers have to find a new way to resolve their complaints. 
Till then, as they say, make hay while the sun shines.  What is your take? 

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Me, road and fundamentals

                                                                                                            
It’s nearly a month now that I am traveling 30-odd kilometers daily to my work place. I have become accustomed to my long driving time and tiredness resulting out of this rigor. Anyways this post is not a vent on all this. 

While waiting at traffic lights, I come across lot of children selling magazines and roses and beggars who want to extract a penny from me. However, I observed that though they have not attended any school but they are smart.  

A child carrying Autocar, MobileMe, Businessworld in left hand and Femina, Grihshobha, Savvy in right hand, came to my car. When he saw only male sitting in a car, he raises his left hand. I guess he understands that men are more interested in auto, gadget and business magazines. In case he is trying to get women driver’s attention, he does it by raising his right hand to showcase their armory of magazines targeting women. 
  
Similarly, beggars spend more time begging for money from guys sitting in bigger cars. Their mantra seems to be simple – size of car is directly proportional to amount of wealth one has. I suppose that they understand time is money for them and they want to use it better by investing it in their better looking customers.

I am amused at this street smartness of theirs. I do not know how successful they are but they do understand the fundamentals of business. They completely understand the principles of marketing and CRM. 

What say?

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Linked In

In this world of Internet, social networks have become a necessity for individuals, organizations and communities. Linkedin is used for professional networks, Facebook and Myspace is used to connect with new friends, blogging is being used to voice opinions and Twitter is used to announce updates in less than 140 characters.  

In India offline social networks existed long before the advent of Internet. I still remember aunties sitting outside in my gali knitting and discussing every household. They were perfect source of any information in my society.  
While in Sangla (will bore you to death with my experiences), I experienced another kind of social networking which I am sure is existing from centuries. An elderly person came to our bus conductor and gave him an envelope and told him to give to a shop near bus stand in a village which was some 100 kilometers away. Bus conductor accepted the package happily and delivered the package when destination. 

This is not one off incident. This is a regular practice followed in villages located in hills. Newspapers, posts, verbal messages and important supplies are delivered by bus drivers and conductors. And everything is done free of cost. This may not be most efficient way of doing business but it has human touch, integrity, sense of community which is otherwise lacking in many efficient businesses. 
Social networking might have become a buzzword few years back in Internet but its roots can be traced back to few centuries back.   

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