Living with Customers

"Connecting to customers" is an old way of interacting with customers..the New Buzz word is ...."living with the customers"..

How many of service delivery people visit customers and stay in their offices for certain period of time and experience real time issues.......face to face

Another example for "living with customer"

Airlines collect survey forms from customers and analyse...report customer satisfactions...

Instead if an Airline Director/VP sits in middle seat in a airline...interacts with the customer during the journey...gets loads of feedback and also gets the first hand customer experience.

Can any of the Railway minister or officials travel along with Passengers in 2nd class...will get loads of improvement ideas...

I believe one of the world famous stores (*$#) used to send their general managers to store fronts to learn from them and interact with customers.

Even in ancient days...Kings used to go and live with the public to get the gross root issues; except for a change they would take care not to get recognized. 

Many examples....... those did not survive, who neglected front lines, public at gross roots...

" Live with customers".........to survive....

ABCDs...........of Customer Satisfaction

Did you learn about ABCDs of Customer Service.......... I mean ABsolutely Customer Driven.....

Seeds of customer experience  start when you set expectations with the customer during the sale and this would grow as you complete the contract. If customer receives a product which is below  expectations, there is a gap generated  and this gap gets widened when customer actually gets a service which is below  expectations. So the Customer Satisfaction depends upon the delta between customer expectations before the sale and after the service. If this Delta is zero  then customer is delighted and if it is big, customer is going to leave you soon. 

Well the delta can be reduced by establishing a  good relationship during the service period. Research shows in this area that customer satisfaction mainly driven by response to customer needs and followed by effective service. Thus customer communication plays a vital role and also the TRUST you build during the relationship. 

Most of the times...we do not understand the impact of lack of service  or failure of the product in the customer environment. In the complex world the delicate dependencies on each other, make the service  more and more vulnerable.

Most of the time customer though expects an end to end view, customer is expecting you to be a core expert in your area.

Connecting to customers is an amazing experience... it has to be beyond the boundaries...well without expecting immediate gains ..you need to carve out  this relationship very carefully.

Just to quote an example of a famous store in US... A person walks in to this famous store for a replacement of flat used tyre complaining about the quality of the product. The store supervisor greets customer and immediately replaces the tyre. Well what is big about all of this....actually the tyre is not purchased at all in that stores...the supervisor answers to a store clerk this way...

"Well the moment the person walked in to our store, he/she had become our customer. customer did complain about our competition tacitly and I replaced the tyre just to ensure he is going to be our long term customer...he will be for  sure keep coming and buying here"....

Well....this story articulates well....about...what is customer service all about.