Having Problem With Managing Customer Services? Learn Directly From The Big Brands What your customers expect and what they receive.

Customer experience has become a differentiating factor among the top brands. Every business is realising the true importance of better customer experience and how it works two ways rather than just one. Not only does it solve the customer's problem but until and unless you know how the customer feels, the company cannot improve.

Today, customers are as big part of a company as any employee working there. It was in the light of these events that OneDirect, a leading customer experience management platform, organised the second edition of Quest, India's largest Customer Experience Management Summit, to address the emergence and importance of CEM. Many brands got together to talk about the new technologies that can be used to engage customers and improve the already existing services.

Commenting on the same, Ankur Singla, Founder of One Direct said, "Providing great customer experience is a tough job. While organisations across all industries are working tirelessly to provide the "WOW' customer experience to their customers, we also need to celebrate the passion for building meaningful and lasting relationships with customers by recognising our fellow customer experience, customer service and marketing professionals."

At last, it comes to how to improve your customer services and we have some of the best in business talking about the same.

The situation in the country requires a lot more completion - Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer at Aircel

Customer experience management is what everybody is talking about todat but the supply-demand equation was always in favour of the supplier who does not think much about the customer or their experience. The situation in the country, though it has improved, requires a lot more completion.

How customer experience can impact the brand and the business model of the brand, this matrix still needs to be defined in a manner that CEOs and founders can find a correlation between the same. A lot of investment goes into distribution and sales, but customer experience still remains post sales dissonance handling and a bit of handling customer queries. This is where the customer experience service is today in India. More the science of customer management services evolve, as it gets understood and as the co-relation gets established, far greater traction of CEM will take place.

It's better to have consumers who are vocal about their displeasure than a silent one - Gaurav Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer of OLX

I am a young father and for past one year I have been telling my daughter bed time story. I made up a fictitious character and I saw that my daughter was really getting into it. Through hit and trial, I found out that she is more into princess and ghost stories, so I focused my energy into thinking just about those genres. She started giving me good feedback.

The second really good feedback she gave me, and I'm thankful she was vocal about it, was when I used to be tired or not in the mood to tell stories, I used to cut short the story to two minutes. She listened to them but the next day she told me to not do what happened during yesterday's bed time story. She gave me feedback and that is an essential part. It's better to have consumers who are vocal about their displeasure with you. It's extremely critical to have this periodic roundup of customer interaction at each touch point, be it with the product or customer support, even if the business is booming. At OLX we have a very few touch points and that's why it's very essential to understand the relation customers have with those touch points and how can be they optimised or a bit more pleasure can be given to them.

So if a customer chooses to go silent over perceived ill treatment or perceived performance, which hasn't been delivered, that's a consumer we haven't build up a relation with yet, but the one who is local and goes on social media to speak out, it shows that that customer cares about the relation he has with us.

Adding to this Harminder Sahni, MD of Wazir Advisors said, "Couple of years back, I came across a book titled "How to be a good American citizen'. One of the points I read there was, surprisingly, always respond to a consumer survey. It's such a wonderful thing to tell that one must always give a feedback, otherwise how will things improve."

Use technology to ensure a better service - Prabhjeet Singh Head – Strategy and Planning, Uber India

At our platform the service gets created and consumed at the same time. To ensure that the business is as close to utility as it gets is our aspiration. So, how do you take a utility business like ours and still create a magical experience which is repeatable at every touch point. That is the challenge we are trying to tackle. Around that what our core principle is, first, to ensure that the data which has been captured from consumers, both riders and drivers, is used in a meaningful and fruitful way. That data is helpful to determine which quality of drivers or riders will stay on the platform for a long term. So the data we capture we use it.

Second, at each and every touch point how do you recognise that the service provided with every ride will be different. Our service has three steps – before, during and after the ride. To us it's about reliability. For our first step, we use technology to ensure that if any rider wants a ride, he/she should get it within 5 to 10 minutes. We then push the driver in a certain way to make sure this happens. In the second step, given that rider gets a new driver each time, the offline world (training of drivers) compliments what's happening in the online world, which means that the rider's feedback should the driver in a customised way. He should know what he did good and where we went wrong. After the ride, our third step, the driver should be happy too. So, for them we have a call centre because they are the ones who needs more help compared to the riders who are technologically advanced.

Focus on the basic essentials to build trust. - Alok Kumar

The first thing they expect is the service to be delivered which is their basic right. That's the first confidence brand should give to the customers. Let the service work, and to the point till the promise is delivered. Focus on the basic essentials and that will build trust.

Also, equal focus should be given to the consumers coming from the villagers. For them, the service you're providing has nothig to do with call centres, but it's the retailers. We have to enable the retailer and make them as a service point. Normally, retailers are used for sales and pushing the product, but the customer belongs to the retailer. When you listen to the customer, you find out that they don't want to deal with the company, but local retailer. The local dialect here establishes a personal relation.