Customer Service | For most Indian companies, ‘Customer is King’ only till a sale is complete

Indian companies are increasingly turning democratic, and refusing to treat the customer as king any more. A rash of surveys support what most of us know from our own experience virtually on a daily basis. Social media too, is littered with stories of aggrieved buyers of electric two-wheelers that went up in smoke within months of purchase, and long-suffering customers of banks forced to make several rounds of their branch, during banking hours, for the simplest of requests like updating a phone number. The woes of passengers trying to hire a cab from a ride-sharing app company are so numerous as to deserve their own blog posts.

According to the Qualtrics 2022 Global Consumer Trends report, an overwhelming 96 percent of Indians who were surveyed said they were dissatisfied with their experiences as customers in 2021. The cost of this negligence to businesses, a whopping $216 billion, with a third of respondents saying they had cut spending after a poor customer experience. Indeed, across the world consumers say they would buy more if businesses treated them better.

The poor service standards cut across sectors and geographies making little distinction between size of the companies, or the nature of their services. Thus, 79 percent of the 15,000 airline passengers surveyed by LocalCircles for a recent piece by Bloomberg said that they believe carriers in India are compromising on passenger comfort and cutting corners as a result of the pandemic. Customer service and the behaviour of airline staff was deemed to have deteriorated sharply in the wake of COVID-19.

Banking is another area where almost every customer has a horror story to tell. So severe has been the backlash that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last month set up a six-member committee headed by former Deputy Governor BP Kanungo to review standards and evaluate the efficacy, adequacy, and quality of customer service in entities regulated by it, identify gaps, if any, and suggest measures to improve the service.

The committee will only make suggestions on what institutions can do to make improvements, but it is obvious that unless there are serious penalties for laxity, customers will continue to get short shrift. Public sector banks have been hit hard by growing digitalisation, and have been losing business to newer fintech entities. Already notorious for their blatant disregard of customers’ interests, they are now hollowing from within in the face of cutbacks in hiring combined with the exodus of younger employees to private companies. This has further crimped their ability to attend to customers.

Multinational and private banks, by contrast, have a clear hierarchy of attention with high-net worth individuals being given special treatment to the exclusion of all others.

But it isn’t just older businesses that are finding it difficult to meet the needs of their customers. Even e-commerce, the chosen medium for shopping over the last two years, offers no respite, with glitches in the payment process, insufficient information on order status, difficulties in returns and refunds, and non-existent support, souring the shopping experience.

The Qualtrics report sums up the universal exasperation of online shoppers stating that “as people flocked to digital over the past 18 months, companies have failed to respond, leading to fragmented and frustrating customer journeys and support as they switch from one channel to the next”.

Some experts have questioned whether it is service standards that are declining or customer expectations that have been rising, often to unreasonable levels. Customers, it is said, want personal attention and immediate response to their queries and complaints. The defence doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for the simple reason that mostly, customers are only asking for what companies promise before a sale is made. It is when “We are always here for you” turns into “All our customer care executives are busy. We will be with you shortly”, that the grievances start. Many companies have now turned over customer care almost entirely to bots. The problem is these are programmed for normal and routine queries. When a customer has an unusual and unique problem it can be very infuriating to be met with pat, predetermined replies.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any solution to this quandary. The market dynamics will always ensure that post-sales is the least of a company’s priorities.

Maybe this will drive Indians to start adopting the do it yourself (DIY) culture prevalent in most Western markets. After all, it is better to fix a leaking faucet with some help from an online video than wait interminably for the company to send someone to fix it.

Sundeep Khanna is a senior journalist. 

Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.