Customer Service- The most crucial aspect of Modern Day Marketing

Forget product, pricing, promotion and your distribution channels. We can keep making marketing more complex and keep adding more Ps and Cs and jargons, but the single most important factor in marketing that will decide the fate of brands going forward is customer experience. A superior product at the best possible price which is easily available to the customer will all become points of parity, if it already isn’t. So, how can brands give a superior customer experience? How will brands differentiate?

The answer is staring us right on our face. It is customer service and after sales support. For most customers, the moment of truth comes when something goes wrong with the product/service. And believe it or not, whenever such an issue is reported, the number 1 KPI that is being tracked in most organizations is the cost incurred to solve the complaint. As marketers, we keep looking for opportunities to delight the customers so that he/she becomes a brand champion. And when that opportunity is knocking at our door, we decide to look elsewhere. The Hindi equivalent from the movie Hera Pheri does more justice to this act, “Khud Lakshmi tilak lagane aayi h, aur tum muh dhone ki baat kar rahe ho”.

Unfortunately customer service is still seen as a cost center. Most mandates to the service head from the CEO goes like, “ Ensure that the cost of service is less than 1% of the revenue, outsource it to the lowest bidder”. And the same CEO will also keep talking about the need to create pull for the brand, create brand champions etc. And if you take the Indian scenario, especially the consumer electrical and electronics sector from which I am coming from, things could not be worse.  For the consumer, it is a nightmare. For the organizations, well, keeping service costs under control is of utmost importance. Ironically, the same organizations spend crores of rupees on television and newspaper ads proclaiming customer centricity as the core value.

Another reason that contributes towards this kind of behaviour is the organization’s belief that its products cannot go wrong under normal circumstances. So, the assumption is that the customer must have done something wrong and used it in a wrong way, and so the warranty should be void. While it may be true 10-15% of the time, isn’t it absolutely ridiculous to assume that this is the standard? The lack of humility and the ability to accept that things can go wrong is hurting a lot of brands.

And hurting surely it is. 10 years back, most complaints were through telephone or email. Today, a consumer uploads a video of the defective product, and it gets thousands of views. A Facebook post ranting at the service goes viral, and a tweet highlighting such issues gets thousands of retweets. Negative reviews on Amazon bring the online sales team to its knees( Obviously I don’t need to dwell on the importance of product reviews on e-commerce sites) On the other hand, if you are able to delight your customers through service, the word of mouth also spreads 10 times thanks to social media.

But with resolve from the top management, this is something that can be solved. I am sharing some examples from what we have been doing for the last 3 years and our reviews and the thank you mails from clients show that we have been fairly successful.

a) A change in psychology to embrace negative feedback- Come on, after all, we are humans. And when someone criticizes our product that we have put our heart and soul into creating, it hurts. And more often than not, we choose to overlook the criticisms and validate ourselves with all the positive feedback and rewards and recognition that we keep getting. But that leads to zero improvement.

At Atomberg, we keep asking all our customers for a feedback( positive or negative). In fact for all our e-commerce sales, we explicitly ask each and every consumer to post a review( positive or negative). In case of a negative review, we go out of the way to resolve it.  A few months back, an elderly couple bought 5 of our fans. But they found that the lowest speed was also too high for them in winter months. We ended up customizing 5 fans and gave them the exact specs that they required. Does not make any sense economically, but we created 2 brand champions who will definitely do all they can to tell people about their experience. Needless to say, we also took that feedback and are going to incorporate the lowest speed setting in our next version. We definitely believe in the saying, “To get fewer complaints, we must first get more complaints”

b) Marketing and Service Team Cannot Work in Silos- Research has shown that customers who have had a problem with your product and which you have fixed with a delightful experience are 2-3 times more loyal than customers who have not had a problem. When the marketing team’s most important KPIs include customer loyalty and customer retention, does it make any sense to have a service team which doesn’t interact with the marketing team? Of course it doesn’t.

When we launched the product in November 2015, I was heading both the service and the marketing team. As we have scaled up and we have a separate service team, I still ensure that I go through each and every service query so that we don’t miss out on any single chance to delight our customers. And the service team’s single biggest KPI is customer satisfaction.

As marketers we may like it or dislike it, but in the next few years to come, a very simple thing like customer support will decide the strongest brands of our times. Not a creative advertisement, not a superior product and not a highly optimized campaign on Google and Facebook, but the simple act of a service coordinator listening to your problem with empathy, acting as quickly as possible, and a service engineer solving your problem with the lowest possible turnaround time. This is the present and future of marketing.