Monthly Archives: October 2006

Customer Service is the face of any business. Happy and satisfied customers is a prerequisite for customer retention and creating a positive image for the company. Success of any business highly depends on the services packaged with their products. Whether it is a software program which is developed to provide the services or a customer support representative providing support to the customer, it is very critical not to mess things there. Customer Service should be aligned properly with Marketing, Finance, Product development and other critical operations of the company to make sure the customer is getting served to the optimum standards.

Why is it so important to get this right? Well you can draw parallel between designing and customer service. If anything (be it a complex entity like building, vehicle or software application, or something as simple as a can opener) is designed perfectly, no one notices it. It becomes part of the regular work-flow. But if there is some flaw in it, something that is not as expected or intuitive, it gets highlighted. Same happens with customer service. Everyone expect is to be seamless. So as far as the customer is getting the service he expects, no one notices it. But as soon as the customer service experience is bad, the customer satisfaction index towards the entire company and its products dips down. That’s the nature of the game and everyone needs to accept it.

We can lay out some basic rules any company needs to follow to provide good customer service. First and foremost, don’t experiment in this area. It’s really astonishing to see how companies provide disastrous customer service just because they are experimenting with some cool new tool or technology in this area. The most common example that pops in my mind is speech recognition software to answer the customer calls. That’s a major disaster. Everyone in the software industry knows that the speech recognition technology is not yet ready to deploy as a dependable tool. Still companies use it in answering customer phone calls. No customer in the World is going to call you till they are in dire need of help and then when you ask them to speak the details, and try to interpret it with something which is not perfect, you are basically forcing them to blacklist your company. So let’s first make sure the technology we are using is sound and then use it on the customer. I think this is the last place you got to experiment.

Rule #2, don’t drag the customer to the tipping point. I think the entire reason a company has customer service is to keep the customers happy. A company should put a face in front of the customers so that the customers think that the company appreciate their business, not that you are one of zillion customers we have and we don’t care if we lose one. For instance, try to keep the wait time to a minimum. Companies should deploy good analytical tools to make sure that a customer is not holding phone for ever to be answered, or waiting for technician or delivery personal for too long to show up. Along the same lines, charge your customer reasonably. Asking insane amount of money to help a customer fix his computer on phone if it is out of warranty, or to use a feature that’s not covered in the customer’s opted plan is like burning bridges with them. This is like literally dragging the customer to the tipping point from where they have no option but look for alternatives. I understand that cost is important for the company to take into account, but showing some compassion over here might lead to a long term trust relationship with the customer.

One more thing that’s important in customer service is that the entire company should take this as a priority and stick to the commitment made to the customer. How often do you reach an airport to find out that the plane is overbooked and they don’t have space for you? Or your flight got cancelled for some “unknown” reason with no alternative but to wait? Or you reserved a rental car and that type of car is not available ( Or in Seinfeld’s World – they know how to take reservations, but they don’t know how to hold ’em.)? This should never happen. If as a company you are committing something to your customer, you need to stand behind it. Every company should have system in place to fulfil the commitment made to the customers.

In short, go an extra mile to keep the Customer satisfaction high, because you can have great products, awesome supply-chain and what not, but if you don’t have a satisfied and happy customer, you can not succeed.

Since my blog post about Rights and Wrongs of Brand Extension, I have had lot of interesting discussions on this topic. Some very good thoughts came forward and we were able to classify all the brand extensions we talked about in right and wrong buckets using the three things mentioned there – creativity, innovation and link to existing product line. One point that again and again came forward, which is also the reason for me writing this post, was how a company that had wrong brand extension could have done it correctly? So let’s pick the two wrongs mentioned in the previous post – Amazon and Dell.

Amazon missed two (of the three) very important things in its brand extension, and that were the link to the existing product line and innovation. Here’s an online book store that got famous for its long tail and recommendations. Logically thinking, brand extension for this online store would have been selling products where the long tail and recommendations matter the most. Another logical brand extension would have been showcasing products similar to books to customers who came to their site looking for books. This suggests Amazon should have evolved into an online store selling and renting (in some cases) books, music, videos, computer and video games and software. I think by keeping this link to existing product line in mind, they could have fixed brand extension to a large extent. Trying to sell products like shoes, jewelry, grocery and pet supplies from their online store just broke this link and made it loose its essence. One could argue that this could have limited Amazon from going into a large part of 35 product categories they are involved in today. Well I think, keeping Amazon the extended book store to the products suggested above and spinning partner stores for these other product categories would have been a better idea. Amazon could have had distinct links to these stores from their original store landing page and search results in order to use the credibility and dependability of Amazon, may be shared the shopping accounts and user information and applied some of its innovative shopping experience to these other buckets. The important thing to note here is the segregation to prevent bad experience for a customer coming to the book store.

Another area that Amazon could have fixed during brand extension is innovation. Amazon, which rided on its innovative stinct all through the dot com boom and bust came up with no major innovation in brand extension. Along with creating an extended book store and partner stores, one innovative step Amazon should have taken in brand extension is segmenting its stores more on the customer intelligence and less on product categories. For example, a customer looking for Mystery novels would feel Amazon is a store for me where I can find all Mystery based books, videos and games to buy or rent, a community to get involved with others with similar taste and an extended search feature with categorized results around what I am looking for. Amazon does it to a great extent, but its not well meshed across products due to the wrong brand extension.

Moving on to Dell…I know lot of people believe that Dell did not fly off with electronics because Dell’s primary customer base was enterprises and not home customers. But I think, if Dell would have brought the kind of innovation and creativity they brought in selling computers in the field of electronics, they would have done much better in their brand extension. Dell evidently missed creativity and innovation in its brand extension to electronics. Dell is known for two things – Direct marketing to the end customer and build (or configure) your own personal computer. It went on to brand extension to electronics, a somewhat natural next step for the biggest computer maker in the World after already extending its brand in servers, storage and printers. It did link back to its computer product line by selling directly to the end customer, but the build your own stuff was not there. Well if you are Dell, you got to have that personalized experience in there to satisfy your customers.

How about trying to add it to electronics? I think it will be really creative if you ask your customer to take steps with you to build a digital camera instead of asking them to choose one from the given list of cameras. Literally speaking you don’t have to build one for each customer out there, what you can do is start from the most basic feature (say megapixels) and provide options (like optical zoom, digital zoom, screen size and memory type) to choose from to reach to a final model. It’s basically bringing the customization experience from the personal computers and applying it to electronics. In order to make this happen, Dell will have to (or make the equipment manufacturer they are partnering with) support enough options in each category to meet the customer needs. If Dell is successfully able to do this in electronics like cameras, MP3 players, televisions and so on, it will be a real innovative step to empower customers configure their own electronics leading to a successful brand extension.

Exercise to the reader ;-) please send me cases of brand extension, both successful and unsuccessful, which you think contradicts my thinking on this topic.