soft skills

To delight a customer

Orienting employees to delight customers is critical to the success of an organisation, writes Prem Apte

When you dial the hotel reception from your room, a sweet voice responds, “Good morning, how can I help you?” even before you have said “Hello.” A grocery shop round the corner sends an energetic young boy to deliver a Rs 10 loaf of bread at your doorstep at 10 pm. We in the software industry are focused on our deliverables. While we keep delivering software successfully, we always wonder how to orient our organisation to delight the customer.

We can learn from an Aquaguard salesman or a joker in a circus how to keep a customer pleased. However, software services delivery has its own complications and difficulties. The workforce is highly educated, technically oriented, and is hired to meet requirements for technical skills. There is not much focus on customer delight except for exceeding expectations in technical and qualitative terms.

Employee orientation

Orienting employees to delight customers is critical to the success of an organisation. Volumes can be written on the need to imbibe qualities such as a positive approach, etiquette, proactiveness, values, leadership and the organisation’s culture as essential steps to achieve the goals.

However, the most critical aspect for achieving results is orienting the mindset of the staff—especially those who face customers—towards customer delight. How does an employee understand what a customer expects? What follows is something that works.

Appreciation

Every employee undergoes a one-day free-format interaction with an experienced trainer. The trainer finds out what participants understand about Customer Delight, Customer First and Customer Orientation. What do they want to learn about customer orientation? What challenges do they see in satisfying and delighting a customer? Is it important to delight a customer? Do we ever say no to a customer? How do we say no to a customer? How do we salvage a messy situation?

Participants are taken through their own real life examples of dissatisfaction when they were serviced at a gas station, bank, government office, courier, children’s school and so on. They are asked to recall the emotions they had experienced, and the promise they had made to themselves—never to use that service again. They are also asked to count negative references they provided to their friends and colleagues.

Every person also remembers the times when they got the best of service. In brief, participants are reminded of their personal experiences as a customer through many group discussions and presentations. They are also taken through real-life success stories and role plays before being reminded that they are now on the other side of the table. Customers now expect all this from them!

Organisation culture

Setting and managing the customer’s expectations is the next important activity in delighting the customer. In an organisation these activities should happen irrespective of whether a Hema or a Rahul is in charge. Though each employee has been given inputs on customer orientation, a large software services organisation cannot expect each software professional to be an expert in managing expectations.

To a large extent, a set of standard processes can take care of setting and managing a customer’s expectations. Establishing a reference at every stage of the project helps to build and manage customer expectations. A formally approved project plan, customer sign-offs at critical stages in the project life cycle, regular project tracking, status calls with the customer, and logging of risks and issues on a weekly basis works to avoid surprises and customer disappointments. The customer becomes aware of his own achievements with the vendor team through the regular progress reviews. It takes his own confidence level higher.

However, unless customer care is demonstrated by the senior management through participation in issue resolution and customer visits, standard ISO 9000 or CMM processes will not help beyond a point. ISO 9000 and/or CMM accreditations will take an organisation up to the ‘meeting customer requirements’ level but not beyond that.

Customer feedback

There is no substitute for formal customer feedback at regular intervals. This could be at a weekly status call level, end of project phase, or it could come through customer meetings. Through formal customer feedback comes understanding of the customer’s real priorities and pain points.

I have come across a situation where a customer came to the point of cancelling an order due to problems in commercial processes whereas our organisation was focused on software delivery process improvements.

Exposure to the customer’s social and cultural setting helps in understanding unsaid expectations of the customer. Exposure through cross-cultural training or practical project experience goes a long way toward delighting the customer.

Apte is delivery centre head, Zensar Technologies