The Hindu Business Line : Respect the context, but deliver the core

Any interaction, direct or indirect, with a customer is an interaction with the brand. This is the first of a dozen rules in `delivering a great brand experience' that Jayanta Sengupta lists in Wraparound,' from Rupa & Co.

"A customer who feels ignored will vote with his feet." So, another rule insists that you should plan for all possible points of interaction. The customer will find ways to interact that suit him the best, not you. "However much you may want to move him to an IVR (interactive voice response) tree on the helpline, if he doesn't like it, he will land up at your branch office and give the staff hell, particularly if he is upset."

A corollary to this rule is that you must remember to plan for `consistency and complementarity of experiences across the various points of interaction'. The book cites from Bob Thompson's article `Avoiding the multi-channel death spiral' thus: "Customers want companies to know them and work with them seamlessly across channels. It's one relationship, not one customer via the phone, another online, and third through a dealer." To achieve seamlessness, `train, monitor, and retrain' your staff, says Sengupta's rule eight, because "all members of the value delivery chain are your brand ambassadors."

The seventh rule, again, is related to interactions. The author exhorts companies to document all customer interactions, processes, and solutions they wish to deliver. "Also codify and document all those that you don't want to deliver." Leave space for learning, innovation, and creativity, he advises. `Customers change and evolve'; and so, to assume that experience delivery practices are cast in stone is `a sure way to becoming irrelevant'.

Rule two is that any communication to a prospect or a customer is a marketing and brand communication. "All such communications are initiated by the brand, and are by definition intrusive." Sengupta cites as example persistent calls from credit card companies about offers of large loans at very advantageous rates, which only abruptly terminate with a belligerent refusal by the called. Since the initial offer is an intrusion, the company should recognise that while cross-sell and up-sell are excellent objectives, the customer must be in the mood to cross-buy and up-buy, he reasons.

The third rule, inspired by Geoffrey Moore of the Chasm group, reads: `Respect the context, but deliver the core.' Explains the author: "For a play, the actors are the core, the stage is the context, just as for a hamburger the burger is the core and the bun the context. For a customer on the helpline, resolving the issue is the core, the manner and speed of resolution is the context." Therefore, `all intermediary steps' in an IVR system should be `quick, easy, and idiot-proof', so that the customer can `get to the problem statement and resolution at the earliest'. Whole chapters have been devoted to each of Hutch, Tata, Manhattan, Shoppers' Stop, and Planet M. The story about Manhattan that Sengupta narrates is how in a crowded credit card market, the new entrant from Standard Chartered could differentiate on the basis of brand experience. One of the findings of the bank's research was that the cards market was `a branded commodity market', because users were `pretty neutral towards which card brand is used for what purposes'. A key inference, therefore, was that a significant opportunity existed for a new brand to carve out a niche for itself.

And the Manhattan customers seem to be happy. "The average waiting time in Mumbai to speak to a relationship officer was 11 seconds, timed over 33 calls," reports the author. In contrast, HDFC Bank and Citibank took nearly two minutes to connect a customer with a bank official, according to `phone banking transcripts' at the end of the chapter.

Informative and insightful.

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali