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Showing newest posts with label Community Service. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label Community Service. Show older posts

Tata Motors Blooper on Customer Service

 
Dear Various Teams at Tata Motors,

Team at Tata Motors have done commendable job in designing low cost yet beautiful Nano. They have also done great job in turning around JLR. Team has also done some commendable job in making efficient and spacious cars like Indica and Indigo. Great work by every member of this team.

But they faltered at one place. It is not their fault actually because committing this fault requires less of brain. They have faltered in designing customer contact support form.
 
 
 
The above form is available on Tata Motors website wherein customers can voice their concerns, submit their complaints and give some suggestions to top management.

However, they have committed one mistake in this form. Mandatory field is Registration Number of car as issued by state governments once customer owns a car not before that. Now in ‘complaint area’ dropdown, there options of pre-sales and delivery. If a prospective customers has any issue with pre-sales process of the company, how is he supposed to fill in registration number. If customer has some problem in getting the delivery of his vehicles from Tata dealer, how is he supposed to put registration number of car.

I have absolutely no clue.

It seems this page is designed by some IT geek, who gave live demo to a guy sitting in a cabin wearing a suit and tie and sitting away from real action happening on ground.

I showed this blooper to some of my colleagues and their first reaction was ‘This link looks like a formality from Tata Motors’. I decided to validate their statement and posted a complaint from their ‘Contact Us’ form. And waiting to see whether I will get some kind of response or not. Will keep you updated.

I really wish someone from the team, who regularly interacts with customers and is aware of things that are happening on ground, have used this form diligently before rushing it to on their website.

I hope it gets rectified before more customers like me start encountering this strong wall, which makes customer feedback process difficult.

PS: - Yes, I am having problem with Tata Motors delivery process and a stinking post on their shoddy customer service is just brewing up.

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Hit at the Top




Want a resolution for your complaint? Hit at the top.

My friend experienced a bad service from one of the leading telecom players in India. He had an internet connection which he wanted to disconnect. He paid bills and cleared all his dues. But the company forgot to disconnect his services.

They kept sending him bills. He responded them by writing mails to customer service to clarify issues. But he continued to receive bills. Then he started receiving threatening calls from their collection agencies. He clarified again to everyone and showed them necessary documents.

Nothing happened. Threats continued followed by a legal notice. Frustrated by all this treatment, he decided to bypass the whole system. He already knows that employees are against customers. He observed that departments inside the company are working in silos and do not communicate with each other. To resolve his issue, he wrote a complaint to the company CEO (yours truly's advise).

Thankfully after three days,  he received a call from the CEO's office. The guy apologized and closed the issue. My friend heaved a big sigh of relief.

Moral of the story - Do not believe in company's customer service. Do not believe that company's processes are designed to help customer's cause. Do not believe in assurances given by employees. Hit at the top. Nobody bothers more than the boss.

I experience it lot. I, being in customer service department for the last three years, have observed that complaints coming from our Chairman's office receive highest attention. We forget everything else and go all out to please that complaining customer.

Letter from the top just helps us to shrug off our chalta hai attitude and remind us that customer is still the king. I know this is wrong on our parts but unfortunately that's how the whole thing works.

Usually, hit at the top works.

Hit at the top = complaint resolution.
Hit at the top = employee attention.
Hit at the top = peace of mind.

Next time when you receive poor customer service, you know what to do.

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Promoters and Passive




I loved these terms. Promoters. Passive.

Passives, as the name implies, are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are easily wooed by the competition. These customers are disloyal, tending to make buying decisions based on convenience and price considerations—as opposed to brand loyalty.

Promoters are the least price-sensitive, have the highest repurchase rates, and are responsible for between 80 and 90 percent of positive referrals to a company or brand.

These terms are coined by Bain and Company and I found them here.

I think Apple thrives because of promoters.

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Ten Customer Service Tips





  1. Show respect.
  2. Show more respect.
  3. Show more respect when in good mood.
  4. Show (even) more respect when in bad mood.
  5. Show respect everyday
  6. Show respect to elders
  7. Show respect to kids
  8. Show respect to all customers
  9. Show respect all day
  10. Feel proud when you show respect

Showing respect worked for me, well almost. It should work for you as well.

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Airlines - Customers as luggage




A comment pertaining to air travel on a blog post.

“When I travel I pretend I’m luggage.  From the moment I set foot in the airport, my expectation is that I’ll be treated no better than my luggage gets treated.  As a result, my expectations are so low that any little bit of happiness and politeness brings me great pleasure.”

This one comment speaks a lot about the state of air travel across the world. Travellers world over have given up hope on customer service standards followed in airline industry.

Basic things like smile and hello are luxury. On-time performance is rarity. Pilots are caught drunk while on duty regularly. Employees going on strike or threatening to go on strike.

With such kind of lethargic performance, airlines are fast conforming the fact that they will treat everyone as luggage only.

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Enjoying Journey and Reaching Destination



 
Today I attended a pasta cooking session. I love cooking and keep on trying new dishes regularly. So, this pasta session was a logical thing for me to attend.
 
More than pasta, I was amazed the way chef conducted the session. Whole cooking session was made lively by the chef, who was not afraid of licking his fingers in front of the crowd. He was cool, informal, enthusiastic and knew his stuff thoroughly.
 
Chef regularly involved in conversations while preparation was underway. There were hardly moments of awkward silence during the cooking session. He used his time effectively to build relationships with audience. Though, chef was representing a pasta company, he hardly spoke about his pasta. He concentrated only on the cooking techniques of pasta. Educating customers and building relationship was his priority. His spotlight was on audience and not on himself or his product.
 
In a nutshell, he ensured that people enjoy the journey before reaching the destination. He made sure that people thoroughly enjoyed this journey.
 
I guess this an important principle in customer service. Most of the time, we customer service professionals concentrate on resolutions. We hardly pay attention on making that journey smooth for the customer. We are so engrossed in our processes that we usually forget about the person standing in front of us, who actually pays our paycheck. I guess if we can spend sometime on making that journey smooth, customer might decide to stay back and do business with us after his problem is resolved.
 
We usually put more stakes on reaching the destination than enjoying the journey. It is human nature.  

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Twitter and customer service #2

Another customer service story where twitter helped in complaint resolution.

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, twitter is an excellent customer service tool and usually, the response is prompt. A major reason for this is that the organizations fear that bad word of mouth will spread faster as followers tend to spread news faster than expected.

Another reason is that it is being used as a new medium for interacting with customers and hence, top honchos are monitoring its regular performance. Spotlight is on experiments happening via social media tools. Some companies have integrated these with their overall marketing strategy but most of the organizations are still experimenting with these new found toys.

Twitter is also cheaper to implement as service is free and all you need is someone who can monitor it regularly. But the big question is, whether the person monitoring servetweets (my short for customer service tweets) is trying to know about customers. Is he trying to strike meaningful conversation with customer? Is he trying enough to engage with customer so that a long lasting relationship can be build? Or he is just trying to maintain his SLAs of answering maximum tweets in a minute?

Call centers also failed to engage with customers. Initially, call centers had fair amount of success in resolving customer complaints and reducing costs. But it failed where it mattered most. Building relationships. Moreover, once processes set in and call centers become a 'customer service must' for every organization, they were the biggest reason for dissatisfied customers.

As I have argued earlier, once process sets in, servetweets will also stop bearing satisfactory results. One should also understand that as expectations from servetweets are growing, it will be hard for teams managing servetweets to fulfill expectations. They are bound to feel the pressure and lets hope they do not crumble under pressure.

It is a matter of time before we start hearing complaints via twitter going unanswered as well.

Anyways, just remember you heard this first over here.

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Lucky Customer



 
 
You are a lucky customer if your complaint gets resolved (after numerous attempts) because of twitter.

You are a lucky customer if you are sticking to the same retailer and his grenade of bad policies have not exploded on you.

You are a lucky customer if seller has tried to earn some customer respect by his deeds and not only by words.

You are a lucky customer if you are not one those 99 customers who got punished by irrelevant return policy to nail one guilty shopper.

You are a lucky customer if no customer service tragedy has struck you.
 
How many such lucky customers are there? I hope this is not one of many extinct species.

 

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MBAs on road to nowhere

New sessions in MBA colleges have started or about to start. As usual, most of the seats in MBA colleges are already sold out. Colleges as usual have raked in their money. 


But this post is regarding students who passed out this year. May and June were anxious months for students who passed out this year. Some students end up with fairly good jobs, some settled for jobs which till last year they would have not considered and lot of students are still sitting with their fingers crossed and waiting for call from HR managers. 


Alumni mail groups are filled with please-help-us mails, calls are being made to all acquaintances and ex-colleagues that have some kind of network in corporate world and all those forgotten uncles and aunties are being remembered who have always vouched for their support. But these efforts are hardly converted into any positive results.


Yours truly have also received such calls. Most difficult part for me is what to say. Truth to be told, I can not help them in jobs as my network is small and mostly consist of junior to middle management level. A direct no always demoralize them. A not-so-frank answer ‘send your CV and let me try’ does not help much as follow-up call comes after few days. 


Couple of times I tried to suggest them to start doing two things – blogging and learn new skills.


I am huge fan of blogging and truly believe that in the times to come a compelling and insightful blog about your area of expertise or industry will help you in getting jobs. But then this is long term plan but one has to start some day and sooner it is better it is.


Regarding my advice on learning new skills, I suggest them to learn things like applying Macros in Excel, improve presentation skills by joining Toast Masters club, learn web-site designing, associating with an NGO, and learn and master techniques of digital marketing etc.  This choice will help them in utilize their free time effectively and frustration will not grow. This is again long term. But even this advice is not taken with an open mind as they feel I am getting into an unnecessary bhashan mode. And I do not have any ready made and easy solution to their problem.


This is tough year for all students are passing out in these gloomy times. However, a CV in word format will not help in anyway. Everybody has one. These are times when that ‘something extra’ is being sought by HR managers and Internet gives an opportunity to everyone to obtain this ‘something extra’ at no extra cost. 


Please contribute if you have some easy solution to suggest these wannabe managers.


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Customer Service is all about getting the boring bits right


I'm pleased to present today a guest post by Ramesh. This is the first guest post I have done  and I'm curious know thoughts on this. If you have an opinion, leave it in the comments. 
Cheers, Adesh.
There are airlines and airlines – some good, some bad and some horrible for their service. But there is one I deeply admire for their customer service. What I especially admire is that they seem to have achieved sustained good customer service and on scale. In all organizations, there’s always a person or two who is outstanding in service. But in this airline, it seems to be a habit. 
How did they achieve this ? I asked their operations director many years ago. What he said was very interesting. 
He said service was not a warm , touchy thing. It was not just the smile and the pretty young stewardess. It was more systems, processes and numbers. As an example, he said, one of the things they wanted to deliver as a service was that when you got off a plane and entered the terminal, your bags must be coming on a conveyor. 
They try to achieve this in the following way 
  • The guys who get off the plane first are the business class travelers. These are the guys this airline wants to vow with their bags on the conveyor when they walk into the terminal
  • At check in, they tag the business class traveler bags separately. These are placed at the front of the baggage hold.
  • When an aircraft arrives and when the blocks are placed under the wheels, the timing starts
  • One sequence of events that is set in motion is that the aircraft doors are opened, the ramp is placed, the passengers get down and are whisked by the bus,
  • The second sequence of events is that the cargo door is opened, the bags are unloaded and the baggage trolley takes the bags away to be put on the conveyor belt in the terminal
  • They have configured their operations such that the two processes take roughly the same time.
  • They measure the times for each and every arrival, in each and every airport and he gets a daily summary of the number of times they are out of synch.
  • The two crews are incentivised on sticking to their target times.
This was a different perspective for me. He said that the warm, touchy stuff can lead to occasional flashes of service brilliance. But it’s the hard nosed operational stuff that keeps customer service at a high level. 
Another nugget he shared with me was that he had a team of QC inspectors who routinely flew on his airline flights . Amongst other things, they carried a thermometer. When the coffee was served – they measured its temperature and checked if it was in the prescribed range. This was measured and reported daily !! 
Wow . Wonderful perspective, I thought.
Ramesh is an Indian, living in China, and currently on a sabbatical after many years of corporate life. He blogs on business issues of interest.

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Brand conversations

Idea sandbox became a fan of L.L Bean. Social media played a role in that.

Idea Sandbox posted a blog entry on quality and value proposition of L.L.Beans on their blog.


"L.L.Bean has it right. They’re not offering unusual discounts, slashing prices, cutting quality or any non-sense."

Within ninety minutes from L.L. Bean PR posted a message on Twitter and thanked him for his feedback.

"I just received a note in my inbox from Twitter indicating that LLBeanPR is now following me. The comment below is on twitter."

L.L.Bean Rocks


L.L. Beans is
  • looking for feedback in social media
  • initiating and following conversations around their brand
  • building fan clubs
  • asking people/customers to participate in brand building
Kudos to L.L.Beans. I also became their fan.

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National Services Days Required

US celebrates National Service Day every year on January 19 to mark birth anniversary of Martin Luther King. It is not a day OFF but a day ON. People from all walks of life do the community service and try to help less fortunate people.

This year President elect Obama has requested all Americans to participate in community service.

"Obama is seeking widespread volunteer initiatives across the country, such as serving meals to the homeless, cleaning schools and neighborhoods, or helping disadvantaged youth and the elderly."

In developing countries such as India, more than one service days are required. There are plenty of homeless children who can not afford timely meals let alone basic education. In India, we have dirty surroundings which require hard work of many communities. We can and need to do lot many things for too many under privileged people.

I have chosen four days in a year to do some kind of community service.

Republic Day (Jan 26):- Time to add a new thing to our constitution - community service.
Independence Day (Aug 15):- Time to launch a new movement - help destitutes.
Diwali (October 17):- Bring light to some needy citizens.
Christmas (December 25):- Wanted to end my year on a high.

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