Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Credit the Customer

One of the challenges when serving a large number of retail customers is communicating policy changes. And if the change involves withdrawing a convenience feature, there is all the more criticality involved. There is a good amount of chance that even if a mailer is sent to all customers, a significant percentage of customers will just ignore it.

A couple of years back, I was in discussion with a outlet manager for a telecom service provider. For some reason, the management had decided to stop accepting bill payments in cash. An insert announcing the same was put into the bills sent out in the previous month. The outlet was instructed not to accept any cash payment and accordingly on the given date the feature in the system was disabled.

The day this was implemented was a day of total chaos in the outlet. Every other customer was in queue to pay his bill by cash. On learning that this feature was withdrawn, they were very frustrated.

At this moment, the outlet manager came out with a solution. He instructed all the counter persons to swipe their own credit cards in lieu of payment of the bill. Whenever a card went over limit, he loaned his own card to the counter person. Thus, not a single customer was turned back.

The following day, he sent a person around to pay all the credit card outstanding by the cash collected the previous day. It took about 3 weeks for the scenario to stabilize and have almost all the customers pay in a non-cash mode.

But, atleast at this particular outlet, during the 3 weeks no customer had to return without payment of bill.
 
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