Curtain Raiser

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises; he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

Mahatma Gandhi

Service sector in India accounts for more than half of India’s GDP. In the financial year 2008-2009, the share of services in India’s GDP was 56%. It marks a watershed in the evolution of the Indian economy and takes it closer to the fundamentals of a developed economy, which forces the industry to focus on service strategies.

In a competitive marketplace, it makes sense to aim to provide superior service. It is said that 70% of customers hit the road not because of price, product, quality or availability issues; but because they did not like the human side of doing business with the provider of the product or service. Hence getting customer service right is crucial. To be effective, customer service must be consistently good in every part of your business. From the moment the customer thinks of purchasing, right through to the final sale – there are opportunities for the business to add customer service to the process.

Companies which attain service excellence tend to retain existing customers and make them loyal customers for life. And the company benefits from loyal customers in a plethora of ways. They tend to repurchase the product or service. They can be induced to buying additional product lines or service. They act as the company’s biggest advocates and spread good will by word-of-mouth. Companies also receive constructive criticism from its loyal customers, who help them improve further and meet customer expectations; nay, ‘delight’ them! Organizations like The Leela Palace, believes in ensuring customer delight by taking meticulous care of its customers. It firmly believes in the Indian philosophy ‘Athithi Devo Bhava’; no wonder then that it gets rave reviews from its customers.

With all this talk on the importance of service experience, measuring the quality of service seems most imperative. And so, Custommerce has launched the Custommerce Index – Cindex, the first of its kind in India, to measure customer service experience. Cindex will offer Indian businesses and consumers a measure to benchmark quality of service experience in the market based on outcomes such as satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy, expectation fulfilment, ideal performance and value for money. In its first random survey, the Custommerce-Feedback Consulting Service focused on 4 services – intra-city public transport (train and bus), savings bank accounts and mobile phone services.

Cindex found that only about 5.1 per cent of respondents were able to recall a great service experience; revealing that Indian consumers have a very low positive customer service experience. Even among those expressing delight, the predominant recall was about an interaction that is part of the normal service that the provider has to offer. Of the four services studied, intra-city bus transport fared the lowest in customer service experience.

It is evident that India has a long way to go, to attain service excellence. We need to work towards identifying challenges facing the customer service industry and identify strategies to achieve a customer-driven economy. As someone rightly said, “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.” And that game is what we need to win.