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Building a culture of customer service

By providing excellent customer service experience consistently, organizations today can win and retain the loyalty of their clients. Faiz Askari on why building a customer-centric culture is essential for business advantage

A great customer experience is one of the most important elements in today’s shrinking world, where customers have infinite choices at their disposal. Customers simply expect more than just a good product or a low price; they expect to be treated well. By providing an excellent customer service experience consistently, companies can win and retain the loyalty of their clients. 

As the market is getting acutely customer focused and business oriented, organizations are also gearing up to chase their client demands by displaying an efficient customer-centric approach. The IT industry has two major types of software outsourcing companies—the offshore oriented organizations which are highly delivery process focused and then there are the MNCs. Many Indian originated IT service companies fall in the former category. Balaji Srinivasan, Associate Director (Client Services), BFSI vertical, Virtusa Corporation stated, “The primary strength of MNCs is their huge background and relationship with Fortune 500 companies. These companies pride themselves on their closeness with customers and fulfilling their expectations.”

Conveying e4e’s vision to provide business value through services, Chitra Swamy, General Manager, Learning and Development, e4e, said, “We provide our customers with utility services based on a combination of domain knowledge, relevant technologies and a reliable global service delivery model. This helps our customers increase business value through cost reduction, process re-engineering, and most importantly, through enhancement of their revenues in the existing and new markets.” 

A glance at the customer-centric culture at Newgen Software reveals that developing caring relationships at work place is an important virtue practiced in the company. This has helped them to build a committed workforce and has encouraged employees to treat customers with care.

Highlighting the importance of such an approach, Kisholoy Gupta, Vice-president, Human Resources, GCI Solutions informed, “Since inception, GCI has adopted a highly client-centric business model that focuses on continuously anticipating and addressing the business needs of clients. This approach has enabled us to partner with our global 2000 clients over the long-term by excelling in providing business-centric and cost-effective IT solutions. At the core of our success is a constant passion to create practices and service offerings based on continuous research and synthesizing learning from our client engagements.”

Need for customer focus

Virtusa has practice managers and client service managers who stay close to the customers while the engineers are engaged in the development process. This closeness and one-on-one interaction with the customers makes for a complete understanding of their prerequisites and expectations. Srinivasan added, “Our DNA is platforming which is dependent upon a complete understanding of the customer’s IT environment.  Intimacy with their IT problems has been the backbone for us to build our platforming services. This method is in perfect sync with our vision of increasing IT and software efficiencies to improve our clients’ time-to-market, reduce costs and greatly improve the customer experience.”

A look at the figures below will make for a better understanding of the deepening need for a customer-centric focus amongst employees of a company:

• The average business will hear nothing from 96 percent of their unhappy customers
• 90 percent who are dissatisfied will not buy again
• An unhappy customer will tell his story to nine other people
• 70 percent will do business again if their complaint is resolved

Grooming and nurturing

Structured industry relevant training programs, strong emotional maturity and stability, team work, proactiveness, a service attitude with co-operation and compassion embedded in it, mastering of communication skills and setting right expectations and taking ownership to address customer issues, among others, make the workforce ready to encounter the competitive challenge of facing customers. Gupta stated, “We follow this up with our performance management system which is aligned to delivering maximum value to the customers, thereby enhancing the satisfaction levels. One of the key client-centric components of GCI’s performance management system includes goal setting for employees based on customer requirements.”

S R Raj, Senior Vice-president, HR, Newgen Software, explained further, “We groom employees directly working with the customers by equipping them with a deep understanding of client needs, training them on managing relationships with customers, communication and presentation skills, and global business etiquette. While training them on handling customers, we make an effort to provide as much insight as possible into customers’ behavior patterns—from equipping our employees to efficiently handle customer queries to delivering promising performances—we make sure we let them experience how to handle the customer environment in the best possible manner.”

Recognizing, rewarding and appreciating employees act as crucial motivators in unleashing high delivery performance. Raj added, “This can be built through communication sessions by the employees who are directly working with the customers and by inviting them to share their views about our services and our relationship with them.”

A great customer experience is critical for business success. All organizations work towards ensuring that their external customers and internal customers, typically people working for the organization, remain happy while using their services or solution or any product for that matter. 

Swamy explained, “We have a strong focus on value creation for customers (external), and benchmarks the business value delivered to customers measured by cost reduction, efficiency improvement and revenue generation. People (internal customers) represent e4e’s biggest assets and strengths. We keep up with this value by demonstrating transparency and integrity in all our transactions. This core value works to our benefit and reflects in the culture of the organization where customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal.”

An organization can develop a culture, which focuses on serving the customer in the best way by encouraging and appreciating customer-centric behavior by the employees. Conducting focused training programs on customer care and enforcing customer relationship is another way of building a customer-centric approach. In addition to this, Raj highlighted, “If customer-centric behavior is made a part of the performance measurement system, it would help a great deal. Organizations can use metrics and measurements to direct customer relationships in the right perspective. Periodic customer satisfaction surveys and proactively sharing metric and measurements results with customers through mailers or e-magazines can help in serving them better.” 

Providing solution as customer’s partners and not just vendors or service providers is one of the key components of a customer-centric business. Srinivasan added, “Though we employ technology to resolve customer problems, the objective is to resolve the customer issues and not to showcase our technology prowess. Towards this, we do an “engineering rigor” audit which is conducted by senior architects which ensures that the technology used is best aligned to resolve the problem in hand.”

Organizational benefits

• Customer retention is an opportunity to do more business over a period of time 
• The cost of serving retained customers declines with time, thereby giving new clients a cost advantage
• Highly satisfied customers act as a positive reference
• Long term customers are less price sensitive to price rises
• Happy and satisfied customers are immune to competition

Employee benefits

• Good customer satisfaction surveys means good scores
• Enable individuals to achieve self and team targets consistently, thereby getting recognized
• Enhances employee’s comfort level and skill sets when dealing with different types of customers

Facing challenges

Pradeep Nevatia, President and CEO, Ninestars Information Technologies said, “Availability of global solutions, be it offshore business or onshore or even near shore with delivery models on web, new avenues and ventures can be worked out.” But aspects like human ego while dealing within an organization as well as with egoistic customers, developing inter personal skills, displaying maturity and adhering to very high demand of deliverables are also considerable challenges to be addressed. Some of them listed below are:

• Handling back-to-back calls with the same level of customer experience
• Handling different types of issues and different types of customers with the same attitude and balance
• Dealing with out-of-scope issues with sensitivity
• Ensuring that the employee’s emotional status does not reflect on calls

Customer expectation for 24x7 services, expectation for time bound responses, learning and adapting to diverse cultures in addition to knowledge of products and services being offered by the company are some of the pressures employees face while serving the customers. Raj stated, “The benefits of customer-centric approach to the employees are that they can learn to use customer related information for improving their own performance.” This in turn, helps employees expand their personal network to acquire skills for multiple products and services and an ability to connect within the organization.

faiz.askari@expressindia.com