(This is the third in a series of articles on entrepreneurship.)
DIM sum lovers in Singapore were sure to visit the DTF restaurant in Takashimaya. When normal restaurants locate their kitchens out of sight of the customers, for DTF the kitchen was in fact the shop front. The chefs in the midst of preparing the restaurant's signature dish, xiao loong pau, were in full view of the curious customers who wished to know how the dough was kneaded and what were the ingredients used and how those dumplings were steamed. That was more than a decade ago. Such transparency was difficult for Malaysian entrepreneurs to follow.
When bread stories unfurled in shopping complexes in Singapore, Malaysian entrepreneurs were quick to copy this marketing technique. Pastry outlets on bread talk, bread baskets, and so on sprung up all over Kuala Lumpur. Two such outlets opened in my Taman both with specialty pastries. Sadly, one closed in two months while the other struggled on. Soon, it dawned upon the survivor that the Taman had 30,000 hungry people who could hardly find time to cook. He set up tables and chairs inside his pastry shop. He expanded the menu to beyond pastries, coffee and tea, to also serve dishes from the wok. Since then he had to lay tables along the five-foot way and had to set up a queue counter for seating the customers.
Customers must purchase
Different clienteles required different marketing solutions. Bread products are of plain wheat flour. Bread stories flourished in Singapore shopping complexes satisfying the needs of busy office workers, students and shoppers. In the Malaysian case, pastries now account for less than 10% of the patissier's income.
Once a customer walked into your shop, every effort should be made to ensure he made some purchases. My first visit to Rambler's Ranch at Pennsylvania was before business hours. A cleaner I met not only provided information on the evening show, she got coffee for me and my friend so that we could relax at the balcony and take in the winter magnificence of Beaver Meadows. Inspired by such hospitality, we returned for the evening show.
A restaurant in the Mall of America at Minneapolis loaned talkie-talkies to the customers waiting to seated. The customer could continue shopping in the mall until being informed by the restaurant that his table would be ready in ten minutes – giving time for the customer to walk back to the restaurant from whichever part of the mall he could be.
Customer needs should not be compromised. They are the reason why businesses exist. Enterprise owners should glean the real world for every bit of information he could get on his customers. Cosmetics companies do this by monitoring the type of perfume a woman buys more than once. The scent of jasmine could be easily detected in Malaysia. But it made a world of difference when a perfume sample was given to me by Estee Lauder as "Private Collection". The company's strategy on customer centricity had strengthened a woman's bond to the brand instead of the product.
Filling a need is the common means in deploying customer centricity. Companies using taped messaging for their telephone system may want to reconsider giving instructions to the caller such as, "Please listen carefully". When the caller finally managed to speak to a human, chances that the conversation might turn sour were high as the call centre personnel might not be at the level of authority to satisfy the caller's needs.
Situation had not changed
The above problem was one of the issues I explored in my research into call centres some five years ago. The situation had not changed. These outsourced operations could not complete the customer relations loop when an irate caller asked for the call to be passed to a loan officer or someone more senior because they, the call centre, and the loan department were separate entities miles apart. Some might even add fuel to the fire by giving answers like, " No point talking to my manager ( or loan officer). The answer will be the same."
The deteriorating quality of this outsourced service reached new levels where call centre personnels were trained to talk back or condescend on the callers. We often hear call centre personnels saying, " I cannot help if you lose your temper or raise your voice at me." It does not require the intelligence of a rocket scientist to analyze that the caller's anger needed to be dealt with first at source – which was way back before speaking to the call centre personnel. Having reached this point, how would customer react? I cancelled my credits cards.
In the current state of a networked world, customer centricity cannot be achieved by one enterprise alone. In the selection of an outsourced call centre, do ask, "What do I expect them to deliver?" Answers to this question should include the vertical level that the outsourced operator would be allowed to dwell into in your business. One common example would be requests which needed another level of approval. Whether the call centre personnel would personally call back the customer or should he leave the message, "I will get someone to call you" would deliver differing messages to the caller.
Customer needs cannot be met with poor qualify information. Comments such as "customers do not know what they want" may appear as pieces of anachronisms. In essence it reflected on how badly the customer was informed about the product. Companies need to re-examine this product knowledge gap between the sales staff and the after sales support departments, whether the latter is in-house or outsourced. Customer needs should not be compromised.
