The Importance of Being Dissatisfied

In the first issue of 2007, I said here that this would be the
year of the Mobile for India, the youngest member of the '100-million mobiles'
club.

At the same time, our group publication Voice&Data
released its annual Mobile User Satisfaction survey findings-showing a decline
in satisfaction among India's mobile users across the board, for eight out of
ten telcos.

Last year, our surveys of IT and BPO employees found a decline
in employee satisfaction, amidst a recruitment boom.

And in this issue, the annual DQ-IDC Customer Satisfaction Audit
of 584 large-enterprise CIOs finds a similar trend. In a booming domestic
enterprise IT market, with rising competition, there's a decline in customer
satisfaction of two to three points across the board. The few who have gained
marginally, or have declined the least, are the winners!

So is this good or bad?

Take telephony. I find a clear drop in 'quality of service'
from the time I started using a mobile phone, in 1995. But this is not as clear
as it appears. For instance, I am increasingly intolerant of customer service
issues either with my phone utility, or my banks. Yet there has been a
sea change from the monopoly days of MTNL-DoT or the public sector banks.

So our expectations as customers have changed, and are growing
rapidly.

It's the same with enterprise IT. Rising expectations. High
pressure through RoI, metrics. A need for quick delivery, and ready-to-deploy
hardware and solutions. Delivery and installation may seem a tiny part of the
picture, but they are big issues for the buyer. If the customer's got used to
the pre-charged car battery, then that's the new bar, the new hygiene factor.
You have to do that much more to stay in the same place.

The telcos have not kept up with the pace of change demanded by
their own hundred million connections, to keep quality of service up. Yes, they
have their spectrum constraints, but in all that, those who stay ahead are the
winners.

Many IT suppliers have tightened their credit policy so hard
that their customers are unhappy. A few have been more innovative, with credit
ratings and longer credit for better customers, and they have less
dissatisfaction out there.

Customer dissatisfaction-and its measurement-could be the
greatest benchmark a business has.

The slow days are over. As the Queen said to Alice: "Now,
here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!"
That's the customer satisfaction story. Only a few vendors can run twice as
fast. They are the ones to get somewhere.