Former Chief Operating Officer officer of BPL Mobile and President, Aegis Global Academy Mr Subir Ghosh narrates his experience of turning BPL Mobile into a customer-focused company. As India becomes a services-led economy, its companies need to increase focus on the customer experience of their products, he adds.

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As India moves from an agriculture and manufacturing economy to a services-led economy, interactions between companies and their customers are beginning to gain increasing importance. Customers are more likely to be loyal to services that provide a more customized experience and interface. The quality and experience of these interactions can prove decisive to an organizations ability to compete.

Businesses in the services sector — such as banking, retail and telecom — today account for more than half of India’s Gross Domestic Product. According to the data for the financial year 2006-2007, the share of services in India’s GDP was 55.1 %. By some estimates, the share shot up to 62.5 % in 2009-10.

But research reports show that most organizations in India are yet to integrate a customer experience management framework formally into their business operations. Few companies link the service experience of their products to the organizations success.

As an example, consider that the government regulatory body for the banking sector received 44% higher customer-service related complaints in 2008 compared to 2007. Rectifying these complaints must have hurt the banks’ finances and brand images.

To improve customer experience quality in banks, the Reserve Bank of India is contemplating a rule by which banks will be penalized for poor customer experience. Banks will have to maintain higher cash reserve ratios if they do not meet the requisite service standards. If this rule were to be implemented, we will be able to trace a direct connection between customer experience and a banks balance sheets.

The situation is no better in other sectors, be it retail or telecom. Poor customer experience impacts an organization’s balance sheets in three ways. First, a higher number of customer complaints results in loss of customers. Second, resolving the complaints needs additional expenditure. Third, in order to compensate for the lost customers, the company is forced to spend money on advertising or provide promotional discounts, which increase operational costs even further.

Hence, in todays global economy, a service organizations competitive worth is largely dependent on customer loyalty, which is basically customer expectation versus actual usage experience. The lesser the gap in between them, the greater is the likelihood of customer loyalty.

From a larger perspective, every individual stands to benefit from an economy that respects customer experience. Every person deserves to be treated with fairness and courtesy in every interaction with a service provider be it a bank, a telecom service provider, or an insurance company.

My own experience with implementing a customer experience culture at BPL Mobile

In the early years of the new millennium, GSM mobile operators were threatened with a challenge that made the industry freeze in its tracks. The challenge was brought by the introduction of WLL (Wireless Local Loop), a much cheaper technology that claimed regulatory concessions from the government on the pretext of being a ‘limited mobility service’ but quickly manipulated the regulatory and political framework to turn itself into a full mobility service at a much cheaper cost.

The GSM operators thus grew wary of investing more capital into growing their networks, as they had already accumulated huge losses and didn’t quite know how to move forward with the new WLL service threatening to run away with the market.

Operating managers (I was then Deputy Chief Operating Officer of BPL Mobile) thus had to deal with the challenging task of increasing revenue and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores (those were my Key Result Areas) with a network that we couldn’t expand.

The choice then was between either focusing completely on acquiring new customers, or protecting our existing customers by providing them a distinctly superior customer experience, or a judicious mix of both with the emphasis being on one of the either.

Thus was born the ‘Customer Asset Management’ function in BPL Mobile which grouped all functions of the company into the Acquisition Group (responsible for getting new customers) and the Retention Group (responsible for retaining and increasing revenue from customers who were more than three months old).

The strategy brought large changes in technology and people processes within BPL Mobile to create a service culture within the organization. We used data-mining technology to study large amounts of usage-data of our customers and this helped us to customize our process and product offerings on a massive level. The end-result was that we started delivering a quality of service which made every customer feel that he was an individual and not just another number, despite the fact that telecom was a mass consumer service. It increased the tendency of our existing customers to stick with us for a longer time and shot up our CSAT scores, not to speak of revenue and bottomline growth that were beyond anyone’s imagination despite the doomsday anxiety that had gripped the GSM market.

However, bringing about this transformation was not easy. Any organisation that wishes to adopt a customer-centric culture must first convert to an ‘inverted pyramid’ structure, one that makes the person who actually transacts with the customer the most important entity. It needs to put in demonstrably visible measures such as making every superior in the company accountable to the employees below him. Together, they need to resolve customer queries and problems within a specified turnaround time or else the issue automatically gets escalated to his superior, thus making every person within the system accountable to the guy at the bottom of the pyramid who is the face of the organisation as far as the customer is concerned. While implementing these measures, the popular saying within the company was that there should be only two types of jobs in the company – one that serves the customer and the other that facilitates the one that serves the customer, and any job that did not fit into either of these categories must cease to exist.

We also linked everybody’s salaries to the CSAT scores and their ability to face customers — we got all non-customer-facing roles irrespective of their seniority spend a minimum number of hours in customer-facing positions regularly. One had to regularly interact with customers in order to be eligible for individual performance-linked-pay. Once, I even had mine docked for missing customer interaction.

Considering where we were coming from, there was initially a lot of cultural resistance to change within BPL Mobile. Getting rid of the ‘silo-mentality’ was perhaps the biggest challenge. Employees from Finance, Human Resources and IT found it tough to view their roles as ones being responsible for customer experience. Aligning these functions into the customer experience framework and getting them to accept monetary penalties for poor CSAT performance was always the biggest hurdle. In such type of a make or break situation, the resolve of a company’s top management, particularly the CEO, played a huge role. The questions in the affected employees’ minds were — is this genuine commitment to customer experience or is it mere lip service? Is the focus on customer experience due to cost, necessity, business differentiation or is it due to the very essence of the brand?

This skepticism can only be gotten around by demonstrably showing that such a strategy of solving crucial business problems does indeed translate into lowering of costs and enhancement of revenues, not to speak of a substantially enhanced brand image and long-term ability to compete with the rest of the market.

About the Author: Mr Subir Ghosh is the President of Aegis Global Academy an ESSAR enterprise. His experience spans nearly 28 years in diverse industries like consumer products, consumer durables, and the telecom and retail sectors and includes roles as Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of service companies like BPL Mobile, The MobileStore and Planet M. He can be contacted at – [email protected]