1. Ensure that your customer continues to spend money on “your brand only”.
2. Don’t let your competition offer a product comfort factor which makes your customer even willing to try the other brand.

At this point it becomes very essential for us to realize that customer is going to get wiser and look at product offerings with a magnifying glass to ensure that they are being offered the best deal for their money. High premiums may get even more difficult to justify. What do brands need to focus on:

1. Ensure that there is no quality loss for the consumer. Don’t switch to a cheaper packaging material/raw material to cut corners.
2. Evaluate the “value deals” from a consumer’s mind-set – do you really think it’s valuable when he is trying to spend less for probably the same offering. (but then again not all brands can offer “value deals”).
3. The internal words are cut-back & reduce but I think when the customer is your focus we need to innovate, think of different ways to talk to the consumer and ensure him that the brand recognizes his needs and is changing (if any) to adapt to his needs.
4. Customer service will be a key factor right now. Ensure you’ve got the best guys doing a good job on this one.

This is probably one of the worst times for brands who don’t know what the customer wants; they will disappear by the end of this year. So your company may have cut-back on your travel expenses but not willing to go out and hear your customer speak is the worst cut-back you can do at this hour.

All the best!

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Image Courtesy: ~Athena

In October I applied for the WLAN Broadband Internet service from Reliance Communications. After many weeks of waiting the little dish finally arrived but failed to pick up a signal at my house and we gave up. Post this, I had no conversation with the call centre and actually even forgot to call them to ask for the refund of Rs.500 which I paid during registration. I knew it was going to be an endless battle and was hoping I would make the phone call in my free time to go around the circles before I can pin down somebody responsible to hand over the cheque. But I DIDN’T make the call.

I guess I was running through a patch of good luck. Last Wednesday afternoon I actually received the refund cheque from the Reliance Communication Infrastructure office without having made a single phone call to their office.

Anyway’s, guess after all the bashing that it’s been getting I thought this little effort should be noticed and appreciated. Thank you Reliance.

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When the air-hostess serve the meal to the passengers they have a small list hidden on their tray with each guest name mentioned on it. So instead of saying “Sir, what would you like to have?” I am pleased to hear the lovely air-hostess say “Mr.Bhatia, what would you like to eat this morning?”.

Lots of personalisation and a great customer experience delivered without much effort. Simple, but yet you don’t see many forms of service delivering this experience.

Would love to hear if you have had any other such WOW! factors. Share your thoughts in the comments area.

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Poison is one of the posh discotheques in Bandra supposedly run by DJ Aqeel. Big enough to park a mini-plane inside this is one of the most spacious night spots I have been to in our cramped up Mumbai city. The music was pretty ok with Tuesday being a Bollyfunk night special. All in all a good evening but certain aspects of the place disappointed me.

• No double entry, which means if you walk in once they don’t let you get out and re-enter the place again. Sounded strange for a social night spot.
• They don’t serve plain drinking water. Should it not be mandatory for any eat/drink establishment to serve free potable drinking water.
• No photography – and this really matter a lot to me.  I respect the fact that they like to protect the identity of their guests from mischievous souls who may take the “wrong shots”, but that results in a loss to capture some lovely moments you spend their with your loved ones.

Maybe it was these standards which made the club a “have to be seen location” for some souls but for me I thought the rules made the place absolutely unfriendly.

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For about two years now I visited a health clinic to solve some of my allergy issues. This was one of the modern type clinics with a membership plan, a gold membership card, SMS based appointment reminders and the works.

I was happy with the treatment, although their customer service was something which kind of pissed me off quite a few times.

• It was difficult to re-schedule a missed appointment and it was even more difficult to get through the clinic numbers if you wanted to speak to the doctor directly.
• The SMS reminders came in after the appointment was already gone by.
• You could never confirm or cancel appointments by SMS even though I would do just as told in the SMS instruction list.

Anyway, ignoring these as technical issues, I let them go by and because I needed the medicine I made the extra effort and got my stuff done. What took the award in Customer Service at it’s best was this:

In December was my last appointment of the plan. I missed it and since then it’s been almost a month now, I didn’t get my SMS reminder saying I had missed the appointment. Better still, nobody called me to even check if I was interested in renewing the health plan for another year. I really thought they had an efficient call centre taking care of the customers but now I think they were just a mere customer call centre taking care of only the appointment schedules.

If a credit card company or a bank did this – I would never bother. There are too many options in the market and I would go ahead and pick another. But to think of it on medical grounds you tend to build a relationship with the doctor and also a particular medicine works with you – so I expect they are more concerned about their patients and their well-being. Reminding them if they wanted to continue the relationship to help them cure the problem completely. (I had in no way told them that my problem was solved, in fact the doctor had even recommended me to renew the plan for a year more). So I am very surprised what went wrong.

Well, that’s life. The waiter at the Chinese restaurant even remembered the soup the lady ordered every time, whereas my doctor didn’t even call me to know why I was not coming back to them.

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