CUSTOMER TALK

All of us at HCL Infosystems have had a common best friend for over 25 years.

We call this person The Customer. This friend has stood by us through thick and

thin all these years, supported us when we were fledglings, believed in us, paid

our bills, our salaries, backed our research and other efforts to improve and

made expansion and growth possible. You may ask, with a friend like this, who

needs variety?

Strangely, this friend, the Customer, is variety enough, a personification of

every person who walks into a corporate office or phones in. This is not a

fickle transfer of our affections–everyone is a personification of our

constant Customer and commands our loyalty.

This, in brief, is what customer relations is all about. This is the crux of

any customer relations policy. As in a marriage or a loyal friendship, it’s

critical to offer them the best, and guarantee that anything less will be

attended to quickly. This is the basis for confidence, the only strong

foundation for a relationship. It’s important to encourage customers to

express their concerns, take these seriously and solve their problems quickly

and conveniently.

All employees should be trained in customer relations’ matters, but while

all staff may have complaint handling responsibility, it is necessary to

pinpoint ultimate authority for customer relations with designated persons,

available to act on behalf of the company in all customer relations’ matters.

But while there may be people designated to handle the day-to-day customer

relations matters, if the head of the organization does not uphold the

sacredness of that relationship, it will tell in the handling of the specific

complaint or similar issues.

Customers talk. And customers are in the market forever. Every person who

deals with a seller is bound to talk to someone about his encounter with the

company–through the salesperson or customer relations officer or someone else.

It will decide whose products or services the buyer ultimately selects.

Customers will remember, 10 or 15 years from now, how they were treated the

first time they came in contact with the organization. Their loyalty will be

decided by how they have been treated subsequently. As many as 60% of HCL

Infosystem’s clients are repeat customers. If our customer relations

encounters cannot stand up to scrutiny, we’ll be out of business. In the long

run, business profits are tied to a company’s ability to satisfy customers.

Recent studies in the USA show that about 50% of the time, customers who have

a problem with a product or service are not likely to tell a company about it,

and between 50% and 90% of these ‘silent critics’ are likely to take their

future business to a competitor. The findings also show that dissatisfied

customers typically tell between eight to 16 other people when they have had an

unsatisfactory experience with a company and that negative information has twice

the impact of positive information on purchasing decisions.

Getting a new customer is expensive. It costs between two to 20 times as much

to win a new customer as compared to retaining an existing one who has a

complaint. Complaints can be seen as negative responses or as important business

opportunities–returning two to twenty rupees for every one rupee spent on

complaint handling. These are sobering facts for any business.

So watch that customer talk.

The author is chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems, a DQ Top 20 company mail@dqindia.com