May I Help You!!!

Imagine the following Scenarios -

1) You go to a SuperMarket to buy your Grocery. You ask for a normal pack of Bread and the guy with the “May I help You” Look simply stared you back as if you have asked for 1 Crore. He turns back and calls one of his colleague to help. The colleague after thinking for sometime guides you to the bread packer you were asking for. After Bread you are seating for a particular biscuit and not able to find. You again look out for help from the guy and he simply blinks at you.
How would you feel?
2) You go to this crowded Clothes shop(The famous one of town) and try to buy a dress. You are not going to be noticed by the staff unless you are VIP or they are sure that you are going to buy dresses worth 10K +. Unless you know the exact dress with the color and pattern that you need and have the ability to pick a needle from Haystak(you are just wasting your time getting crushed between the mad rush)

3) You go to this not so crowded shop looking for some simple items. The staff  there are either too busy watching TV or chatting. You ask them for one item, 2 hands shoot up in the air in diff directions and you wonder what that is supposed to mean. You ask them again, and they give you a look as if you are insane to not even know that!

If you have at any point of time faced one of these incidents or related to it then welcome to the “Customer Service” World! And if you have not, then well you are atleast not in India(Because I cannot talk for any other Country!)

Apart from these in person incidents are the famous “Welcome to Soundarya’s Blog. For English Dial 1 bla..bla with series of menu and in the end when asked to talk to a human, the Lady very beautifully says – “Your call is very important to us, our executives are busy in another call. Request you to hold the line.” By the time you get your line connected you would have easily forgotten the purpose of the call.

This is the general scenarios we tend to see currently though mostly any pathetic service is related to Govt Office support.
It’s very rare when you see someone going overboard to understand the Customer’s requirements.

So it was a big surprise for me when, one of the stationary shops actually knew a lot about Quilling and its tools to actually show me what I wanted instead of simply showing what they have and leave it.

 Being in the receiving end as Customers in above scenarios, when it comes to us servicing to our customers/clients(which ever field you may be), What do we do?

Do we service them as they need or as we need??

Comments

Himanshu said…
A very interesting observation indeed. IMHO, a lot of times we get carried away by all the great stuff that we have to offer to our clients/customers. we don't really tend to understand what the customer/ client wants or what is the instigation for him/her to approach this service?

May be a good starting point to think is that when you experienced a good customer service yourself what did you notice the stationary shop staff doing?
Probably:-
1. They were good listeners. They heard you well! They extracted as much information as possible by asking you questions and knowing your concerns. In turn, this helped them make extremely informed recommendations.
2. They had the creative expertise. They knew exactly what to show you when you popped your questions. They had good and convincing solutions to your queries which in fact built the trust!

Learnings from day to day incidents makes things more feasible and viable for implementation.

Good post Sound! Cheers!
soundarya said…
spoken like a true BA :P

but agreed.. these small learnings make a lot of difference..but more than learnings, its the implementation where we all lack in general :)
Observation, well done!

Good to see that our sellers are learning the art of customer retention, at last. Always, retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one.
Unknown said…
Hey Sounds,
Times are changing... a few years from now poor customer service will be thrashed on FB and Twitter...Even in a country like India where there are aplenty customers, the focus will change..
Today you blogged about them without picking names... 6 months from now you would be thrashing them head on in the proper 'hashtag' forums... Welcome to the revolution :)

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