Customer Delight through Service Delivery

Customer Delight through Service Delivery

How happy are people with the service delivery in India? Read on to find out what a survey conducted by a few students at SDM IMD unveiled.

Maanasa N.

Shrestha N.

Venipriya J.

IInd Year,

PGDM

It would not be an understatement if one said that, in the long run, the market leader is a firm which keeps the best interest of all its stakeholders in mind. One of the key, and often ignored, stakeholders is the customer. Without customers, business loses its essence. The key to the success of any firm is its customer. Hence, retaining its customer is of great importance to any firm. And to do so, it is not enough if the firm understands and meets their expectations. It should be able to ‘delight’ its customers. The question is, how can an organization ‘delight’ its customer? Expectations vary at the individual level. Therefore, meeting every single customer’s expectations is an impossible task. Yet we cannot afford to ignore them. Hence the second question is – Which of these expectations should an organization satisfy?

Our summer internship project – development of customer satisfaction index – involved developing an index called ‘Customer Satisfaction Index’ (or the CINDEX) for the Indian market. This index would act as a measure to find out how satisfied a firm’s customers are, in comparison to those of its competitors and also those of the other industries too. In the telephonic surveys that we conducted for this project, we also captured the predominant service experience of the respondent. The responses given may help us in answering the questions raised above.

Predominant service experience

In the easiest sense, the predominant service experience, also called the ‘great service experience’, can be defined as the most memorable service experience that the consumer is actually able to recall. This can be with respect to any product or a product-based service or a service. Customers tend to remember and hence speak about bad experiences more frequently than good ones (David Jacques, 2005). Hence, if the customers could recall a good service experience, we may conclude that the concerned product/service has touched their heart; or in other words at least met their expectations.

The total number of respondents who took part in the survey was 926. Out of these 926, only 98 of them i.e. 11% could recall a great service experience. Note that the rest of the 89% either had no such experience in the last 6 months or they would not call the same experience a ‘great’ one.

Classification of ‘great’ service experience

Customers interact with the firm in two ways:

• When they use the firm’s product or service, and

• When they contact the firm for any one of the following reasons: Information, Transaction (Purchase) and Complaint.

In order to understand better which aspect of the product/service plays a major role in making an experience a ‘great’ one, we classified the responses into four categories:

1. People

2. Product

3. Process

4. Policy

The ‘People’ factor includes the point of contact between the company and the consumer when the consumer interacts with the company either in person or otherwise. This point of contact could be the company head, executive, salesperson, customer care representative, service center employees, receptionist, security etc. The medium of contact could be in person, through telephone, e-mail, etc.

Predominant service experience classified under the category ‘Product’ would mean that the customer is satisfied with the product purchased or service availed. This could be with regard to the features, reliability, durability, price, quality, etc. of the product/service. For example a person may like the features of his mobile phone or he is very happy with his wristwatch, as he has not faced any problem for the past 15 years.

‘Process’ within an organization means the sequence of various activities followed to complete a particular task. A great service experience under the ‘process’ category would mean that the customer was happy with the process he/she had to follow to get his work done; or with the process followed by the firm to complete a task in such a manner that it was hassle-free for the customer. For example, a customer may like the process of opening an account with a bank or he may have liked the process followed in McDonald’s, from order-taking to delivery.

‘Policy’ of a firm lays down the basic guidelines or rules that are to be followed by each and every individual who is a part of the firm. For example a customer may be happy with the policy followed for a Savings Bank account holder (directly) or may be happy with the flexibility provided with regard to the policy. Flexibility in implementing policy is the most difficult to achieve as the concerned person is answerable to his/her higher authorities.

Findings of the survey

Out of the responses we got in the survey, maximum ‘great service experiences’ were due to the ‘people’ factor and nil for ‘policy’. Almost 60% of the experiences recalled by the respondents were made memorable by the people they interacted with. This clearly shows how important ‘people’ (or in other words, touch points) are in creating an impression in the minds of the customers.

We have further classified the predominant service experiences into two types from the point of view of the service provider as:

1. Normal expectations-related Experiences

2. ‘Out-of-the-Box’ Experience

Normal expectations-related experiences are those where the service provider/firm had not done anything extraordinary to please the customer. It just provided what was expected from it or from the product/service. This may be because the respondent did not have any expectation at all (i.e. was neutral to the product or the service provider) or had negative expectations (i.e. may have had a negative opinion about the product/service provider by hearsay and a reasonably good interaction may have resulted in the change of opinion). These customers may be ‘delighted’ even if he/she gets the bare minimum expectations satisfied. For instance, one of the respondents said that he went to a jewellery shop. He did not know anything about jewellery but the salesperson very patiently explained to him the variety available in his shop and helped him in making a good purchase. Here, the salesperson is just doing his duty. But the customer felt so happy with the treatment given that he could recall the incident and considered it as a memorable experience. 99 responses could be classified under this category.

On the other hand, in out-of-the-box experiences the customer gets something beyond what he/she was expecting. One of the respondents shared with us his experience with a consumer electronics shop. The owner of the shop had allowed him to test the ceiling fans individually for their speed before purchasing the product. The respondent was so happy that he said that in future he would definitely go to the same shop for purchasing household appliances. Another respondent had purchased a water purifier from a leading water purifier company. Some (minor) part of the purifier broke due to her negligence. They replaced it free-of-charge after the representative who came home spoke to his supervisor. She had not expected them to replace the purifier free of cost and hence was extremely delighted. 27 responses could be classified under this category. (Note: The total of these two categories exceeds 98 because some of these experiences cannot be attributed to a single factor - People, Product, Process and Policy but to a combination of the four.)

Here again, the ‘People’ factor dominates in both the categories.

Conclusion

The fact that only 11% of the respondents could recall a great service experience shows that customer service is poor in India. From our personal experience, it is not the product, which often disappoints a customer, but the process involved; either in procuring the product or the after-sales service. Also it was the people with whom the customer interacts who made an experience a memorable one. In most cases (where respondents claimed to have had a ‘great’ service experience), the experience was made memorable not because the service provider went out of its way to provide the service requested; but because it provided what was expected from it.

A firm should first concentrate on meeting the expectations of the customers to hold on its market share. To survive in the long run, the firm should meet at least the basic expectations of the customer and this is very important to prevent customers from switching. But is that enough? ‘Out-of-the-Box’ experiences are difficult to create on a regular basis. But when an opportunity presents itself, a firm should take advantage of it to create a lasting impact on the minds of the customer.

Therefore, to become a global leader, a firm should first ensure that it meets the basic expectations of its customer and then move on to create ‘Out-of-the-Box’ experiences.