Service
Standard:
Service quality standard in India sometimes fail to match up
to the world class standards. I want to share with you some instances to
highlight the bad and good experiences.
Let’s begin with my restaurant experience. It was one of the
busy weekends in a middle class restaurant. I ordered fried rice and my
favorite dish, “Thai Curry”. In fact, before ordering, I enquired whether “Thai
Curry” was available there, since the item did not appear in the menu card. The waiter replied with his
usual, “Yes, Sir”.
After spending about 45 minutes of my weekend time ‘WAITING’
and ‘REMINDING’, I got frustrated, and told the waiter that I am cancelling the
order. There came a rude response that I cannot cancel the order because ‘THEIR
CHEF’ (Guess he learns the recipe only after the order!!) had already begun
preparing the item. Finally, I got the food.
To my surprise, the Thai Curry, as the restaurant claimed,
was a ‘THICK GREEN GRAVY MANCHURIAN’. I quickly realized that they do not prepare
Thai Curry. On enquiring, the waiter continued his stand on the dish and said that
was how Thai Curry is prepared.
I called the manager and asked him to ‘identify’ the dish
(First ever time, I conducted food quiz! And I hope that was the last time
too!!) . He was wondering what to say and asked his waiter what it was. I then
revealed to him that his staff insists on calling it Thai Curry. He agreed that
it was not Thai Curry and they don’t serve Thai curry there. He accepted the
mistake from their end, but justified that waiters sometimes mess-up due to the
crowd!! I was amused by this reply because, there were still 4 -5 un-occupied
tables!!
The duty manager clearly lacked the skills to deal with this kind of
situation. These managers are not really empowered; they lack discretion, and rarely think on their feet.
Finally, I spoke to the owner of the restaurant and
explained the situation. But he made no attempt to apologize and did no damage
control. Instead, he said that when I come next time, they will take care. I lost all the hope I had. Now
God only can help him! He didn’t realize the simple fact that an irate customer
will not only ‘not come back’ but also he will talk about this to 100s of his
friends and relatives.
There is no process for service recovery in the above
mentioned restaurant case.
Service Recovery means, just to put this ina proper
perspective, a good service can transform an experience after something
terrible has happened. The Service recovery conceptual diagram, I have referred
here, shows the point where service failure happens and how service recovery
will make the customer loyalty scale to go up. The above mentioned restaurant is not aware that they are not selling any product but giving the customer “the experience”. If the experience is so bad how can he expect the customer to come back?
What is customer experience? It is
difficult to define, but it is the way he feels or carries or perceives the
service.
Let’s look at the following
definition of Customer Experience:
A Customer Experience is an
interaction between an organization and a customer. It is a blend of an
organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated and emotions evoked,
and measured against customer expectations across all the touch points.
Maxine Clark is the CEO of the
highly successful Build-A-Bear Work-shop. Emotions are embedded into the design
of their great experience. Let us hear what Maxine has to say:
"Emotions are a key part of our offering and something
we have deliberately designed into our experience. We want to connect with our
Guests and make sure that they build a connection with their bear so they make
a new friend for life. Connecting on an emotional level is an important part of
the brand experience".
Another example to quote on Customer Experience from the recent article I read. In the 70’s; the Taj
Group empowered waiters at restaurants to say to a guest who returned a dish,
‘If you don’t like it sir, then it’s on the house. At the time, this was
considered a big breakthrough because in the prevailing five star culture of
the day this was definitely to create a positive customer experience.
Not only restaurants but any business treating the customers
as burden, paying little attention to the customer experience will prove
detrimental in the long run. Who knows the organization may not even be there
in the long run!!
Service offerings have got emotional value. I am
reading a book named "The DNA of Customer Experience" “How emotions drive value” by Colin Shaw. Let
me share few points from the book which is very relevant to the subject I am
writing in this blog.
There are four stages or clusters in the hierarchy of
emotional value.
1.
Destroying cluster
2.
Attention Cluster
3.
Recommendation Cluster
4.
Advocacy Cluster
Destroying Cluster:
The first one and the lowest in the pyramid is the
irritated, neglected and unhappy customer. That is the emotion the customer is
carrying. This is called destroying cluster of emotions. You need a method to
measure and monitor the emotional engagement of your customers that truly
understands the emotions they are feeling. From my restaurant example, whatever
they have evoked is a destroying cluster of emotions. Not accepting the mistake
and no damage control (service recovery) etc.
Attention Cluster:
This cluster has got the direct impact on the customer
spend. If you evoke emotions like good food, attention, good responsive staff
and nice ambience or environment etc., customers will spend more money and will
refer to many people. They will eventually become your loyal customers. Why I
say eventually, you need to do this continuously, lest, these emotions will
wane.
Recommendation Cluster:
This
cluster deals with the emotions like focused, safe, cared for, valued, trusted.
Just to sight an example. I travel a lot across India. Usually I book in a particular Airline only. I feel always safe and have trust that they maintain the aircraft
properly adhering to all the safety norms and no compromise on that. This Airline always
takes care of the following
1.
On-time departures
2.
Check-in procedure
3.
Professionalism of the crew
4.
The quality of food, just to name a
few.
Whereas about the other airlines, I don’t want to mention the name of the airline (every time our government comes to their rescue from the financial burden using tax payers’ money), I have heard a lot of complaints about bad customer experience and compromising safety regulations etc., against this carrier. How will I feel safe to travel in that airline and recommend?
Advocacy Cluster:
This cluster has got two emotions basically, happy, pleased and
delighted.
After
about a month of this horrible experience (as I described about my restaurant experience),
I came across a contrasting service by a renowned pizza delivery chain. This
chain has been doing their best in keeping their customers delighted!! (one
step above keeping customers just satisfied). We had ordered a pizza of our
choice that arrived warm, instead of their usual HoT! We expressed our
dissatisfaction on this to the delivery boy and we were immediately given a
discount on our next order!
Though,
this chain would not be able to take corrective steps on the current order,
being a home delivery, they have given the authority to their delivery boys and
call centre executives to go to the extent of allowing discounts on the next
order, if a customer has complaints on a particular order! This means a lot
since, the people who are face-to-face with customers themselves can put up a
smile on a dis-satisfied customer’s face!! I would call this ‘An incredible
approach’!
If an organization is serious about building the “Customer Loyalty”, it needs to take care of the “Customer Experience”
