Thursday, December 11, 2008

Customer Satisfaction is the Easiest Thing

The recent attack on Taj (Mumbai) has resulted in multitude of articles describing nostalgic incidences of people's experience at the Taj group of hotel. In line with the same, I take this opportunity to relate my personal experience at one of the hotels belonging to the Taj group.

We were travelling to a religious feast last year to another city. There were three families, mine, my brother-in-law's and my in-laws. We had in all 5 adults and two children between us. My daughter and her cousin were two four-year olds with energy appropriately applicable to four-year olds. We were staying at a Taj Residency hotel.

Breakfast was a buffet affair. All of the adults had their plates full and ready to eat the first meal of the day. My daughter insisted that she wanted chocolate cornflakes and nothing else. I predicted a tantrum coming and was desperately trying to contain it. The captain probably heard our interaction. He sent out his team member to purchase a pack of chocolate cornflakes from the shops outside the hotel and got it served to my daughter. Obviously, the captain that day earned a four-year old fan for serving chocolate cornflakes. While Taj earned a loyal customer for life. Even today, my daughter insists on staying only at the Chocos Hotel everytime we travel. That day the decision of the Captain to spend 50 rupees achieved a high level of customer satisfaction from 5 adults and 2 would-be adults.

Customer satisfaction is that simple to achieve. Companies lose this aspect in plethora of powerpoints, business plans, vision documents, architecture designs and process reengineering. All it needs is set the objective in the right priority. (read my earlier article on the bill collection). Quite often companies do everything, that they deem right but do not bother to check on what the customer deems right.

I was attending a presentation by one of the (then) big six consulting house to a large public sector bank on the future of banking. This was about 10 years back and so had the usual stuff of internet banking, ATMs, core banking, and so on. After the presentation was over, the last slide was what hit everyone in the audience. It read:
"Everything that was said in the earlier slides is useless if the teller does not smile when the customer walks up".

It was just that simple. All the bank had to do was make its employees smile a true smile when the customer walked in. It may not have zoomed the bank to the number one status but would have significantly improved its customer loyalty and subsequent business.
 
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