Posts Tagged Trendspotting
Service Charge Built Into Your Restaurant Bill in Singapore - No More, Please!!
I have been in Singapore for close to three months now. It’s a nice place to live, work, eat and travel and that is enough to make me stay here. But, the thing that fascinates me the most about the place is the “design of incentives and disincentives.” Once you start noticing the minute details about how they have built the nation and systems, you feel amazed at the power of incentives. There is an incentive here for all the “right” behaviours and disincentives for all the “wrong” ones. Let me pick up some common examples. Singapore, for most parts of the 20th century, was a dirty country. To discourage littering, the government enacted heavy fines and followed it up with superb enforcement. Fines for littering can be as high as $5000 and repeat offenders might be sent for “behaviour - correction” activities like cleaning of public parks! I know it sounds like an overbearing idea, but it has worked for the country. And then, there is the much-admired Electronic Road Pricing system and taxes on automobiles, which disincentivizes people to own cars and drive downtown during peak hours. The pricing of parking lots, roads and cars themselves, coupled with a super efficient public transport system, incentivizes people to take public transport instead of driving around, adding to the congestion and polluting the environment. There could even be an incentive for taking early morning trains to town and easing off the peak hours. Every action or inaction has a price to it. Since it needs talented people for the economy, there are incentives to take up Permanent Residence in the country and enjoy several benefits. There are strong disincentives for smoking as it is a major cause of health problems and puts a burden on government spends. Heavy taxes make cigarettes quite expensive and there is no way you can legally get cigarettes from other countries without paying the hefty duties.
While I frantically look for such incentives, I have been disappointed with one particular system - the system of service charge or tipping at restaurants. Most eating places have the service charge of 10% included in the bill. Tipping is discouraged in most eateries and even prohibited at the airport and other places. Now, I eat out a lot and try many restaurants and whenever I fork out the dollars, I expect reasonable service. But, I find that missing in so many of these places. Having a fixed, pre-determined service charge could act as a disincentive for providing great customer service and lead to complacency or indifference in the minds of the men and women who work in these restaurants. They are effectively guaranteed the tip, irrespective of how they treat the customers! I simply fail to understand this in a place like Singapore, which goes all out to encourage the right behaviours.
Here is the link to a nice read (slightly dated) on this topic http://www.singaporeangle.com/2006/11/service-charges-replace-with-tipping.html
1 comment November 11, 2008
Infosys - Reporting the Intangibles
I finished reading Infosys’ Annual Report 2008 last evening. The report was far more professional and comprehensive than anything I have seen from Indian organizations. The first thing that struck me was that the reports begins with the company’s main assets - “people” and a nice quote from Mr. Murthy - ”Every evening our core assets walk out of the gates. We need to have a way to bring them back every morning.” A good twenty pages, right upfront, is dedicated to employees and what Infosys has been doing about them. The report talks at great length about training, development, organization restructuring, learning programs, employee well-being etc. This is in stark contrast to something like Reliance Industries’ annual report, where “Employee Activities” is a mere 3 paragraph lip-service.
More interesting pages follow after the key financial data - on the intangibles. The company presents a simple, easy to understand brand valuation, a score-sheet for intangible assets and many more. The focus on the intangibles is a welcome phenomenon to corporate reporting, which relies overly on business numbers.
5 comments May 27, 2008
Employee Engagement: What Soft Issues Mean for Hard Numbers?
Scene in the boardroom of a typical company:
HR Head: “We are proposing an Employee Engagement survey to be done in the company. It will give us insights about what people feel within the company. It might give us a handle on the attrition situation as well and we will know which specific areas to focus on.”
Executive I: “Well, that means money. We are tight on the budgets because of the market situation. We need to be focusing on getting more business. All I want from you is to make the employees more productive. We need to squeeze the last drops out of the system.”
Executive II: “But, I think doing a survey is not such a bad idea after all. Our competitors mention that XYZ firm does an employee survey for them in their pitch presentations. If we employ a reputed consulting firm, it would be nice to have their name in our official marketing materials.”
HR Head: “Yes, true. Moreover, employees too will feel a sense of being heard. After the survey, we will take focused action to change things.”
Executive I: “I remember clearly that we did do an employee survey about 6-7 years back. What did we do with it? Did the HR take any action based on the findings? It’s a useless waste of money. Fluff stuff.”
HR Head: “No, but this time it is going to be different…”
Sounds familiar. I think so. Many a times hard-nosed business executives miss the point of employee surveys. If the right metrics are used, flawless execution is achieved and there is executive intent to do something about it, employee engagement could unlock a lot of value for companies. Organizations focused on achieving sustainable organic growth can leverage the emotional economy - the power of human emotions - to build a large base of engaged employees and drive business outcomes.
Many organizations think of all this as a “process” which should be done once in a year or a “nice-to-do”, so that they can talk about it at various forums. Often surveys are done and the reports are shoved off in some cabinet and comfortably forgotten about. But, senior executives are missing the big picture. Employee Engagement is critical to business performance. Think this is all “fluff-stuff”? Think twice before jumping off to a conclusion. Take a look at some masked slides I created based on real data:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3071101/Employee-Engagement-Impact-on-Business-Outcomes
This clearly shows how improvements achieved on employee engagement levels as a result of focused actions and Organization Development interventions can yield better business performance. For instance, in the presentation, business centers which improved their engagement levels, improve their sales figure by almost twice more than centers which had a decline in engagement levels. Think of potential upsides on business measures that you can have, if the variance in engagement is reduced and engagement levels rise up.
Top executives need to get off the rhetorical “We are all about our people - our people make us what we are” and show more strategic intent towards their people. When all the process engineering is done, all the money is pumped into capacity-additions and every process is being monitored by six-sigma black belts, and you still want some more juice - you know where you should be looking at - your people.
Take a hard look at the soft numbers!!
P.S. - It’s important to note here that “employee engagement” has been defined differently by leading experts. When I refer to employee engagement, I am specifically talking about engagement levels with one’s manager or workgroup. It is there where bonds with a company are formed or broken. And don’t we know that there is no such thing as corporate culture; there are as many cultures within a company as there are managers. Each manager, with his own style, creates sub-cultures which impact the lives of employees.
1 comment May 24, 2008
What I Want from Google
Google is becoming an increasingly integral part of our lives. At first, it was pure-play search and targeted ads, then came along a whole bunch of communication services like Gmail, Gtalk, Orkut, Blogger etc.. We got Youtube, Picasa, Desktop Search, Reader etc.Then, they started offering hosted services like Docs, Google Apps etc. Finally, as the mobile web took off, they got busy in bringing Google services on mobile devices. I personally spend lot of time using the Google Mobile App and the Google Mobile webpage. As Google continues to touch our lives in more and more ways, I really feel they could do a bit more for us consumers, so that we stay hooked (and click on more ads!!). Here’s a short wishlist:
- First things first - let’s talk about Gmail - the killer email service that gave Yahoo and Hotmail the jitters of their lives. Now, Google provides its Gmail users complete access through POP3 / IMAP, so that they can access their mails from a desktop client like Outlook or from mobile devices. They also have a neat application for mobile phones, that brings the real Gmail experience on the small screen. But, this application misses something which is the “in-thing” today - push email or the ability to fetch email as soon as it arrives, without having to manually check mails. I think this should be an important addition to the product.
- Gtalk was “love at first sight” for me. The neat, simple interface was a great relief from that of Yahoo Messenger. I got hooked. And then I wanted it on my mobile phone as well. Apparently, Google does offer a Gtalk client for Blackberry phones, but not for others. What sin has Symbian or Windows Mobile committed? I agree that there are tons of companies offering Gtalk clients like Talkonaut, EQO, Nimbuzz, Fring, Morange etc., but I really don’t feel very comfortable keying in my password on these applications. After all, I use my Gmail for receiving statements from my bank account.
- Google has a wonderful collection of essential softwares which it bundles and offers as Google Pack. Can we have something like that for mobile devices? A single download that offers essential communications, productivity, entertainment and security tools.
- And, how about a Google Mobile Suite - a collection of apps that provide close to full-blown (with all the limitations of mobile devices) experience of all Google services.
- Currently Google allows its mobile users to access Google Docs on their devices. But, users can just view their documents and not edit them. There are so many smartphones out there in the market which suffer from the same handicap - their devices come installed with Office-like software that enables them to view, but not edit documents. How about Google removing this handicap and getting more eyeballs on Google Docs!
- Google acquired Jaiku, a micro-blogging service, sometime back. Google - can you please give us some information on what are you doing with this? Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms are going to eat you for breakfast. It would be great to have a Google micro-blogging platform which is well integrated with Gtalk, Gmail, Orkut, Reader etc.
- Finally, I know you have a great SMS search service. India has one of the largest number of mobile users in the world and SMS as a service is quite cheap. People do not hesitate to pay premium charges for SMS to vote for their Indian Idols or participate in a game show. I am sure that Google’s SMS service can take off in a big way. Most mobile users in India still don’t use GPRS/Internet on their phones, so SMS can play a big role in bridging the information divide. But, there are two stumbling blocks - awareness and localization. How many people know of this service? A miniscule proportion. First of all, Google should popularize the SMS-based search service. In doing so, they need to push mobile operators as well, since they pocket the lion’s share of the SMS revenues. Secondly, if they succeed in providing the service in local languages, the potential simply doubles or maybe even more. Instead of going to ITC’s E-Choupal centers to get weather information or commodity prices, farmers would get the information in their fields, in their palms, whenever they want. That’s going to be huge!
Dear Google, a little more is all we want!!
3 comments May 17, 2008
A Little More
As newspapers are flooded with reports on the looming food crisis and the sky-rocketing food prices and how China and India are contributing to the phenomenon, my mind wandered towards the differences in the very act of serving food. In India, whenever people gather for dinner in the home of family people, inevitably you have your mothers, aunts, sisters enthusiastically serving food. Even when you are full till your mouth, “a little more” has to be served and lapped up by you. Almost all of us have heard “बेटा थोड़ा और लो ” at our family unions. As far as I understand, this is not so in Western culture. There people are supposed to eat as much as they can or like. There is hardly any motherly pressure to stuff yourself.
As I think, I feel that the act of “a little more” is symbolic of certain things. For most parts of the last few centuries and even now, India remains a poor country with extremely low per capita consumption of most food items. Offering “a little more” food, I believe, is a sub-conscious way of expressing prosperity. The act is symbolic of the fact that “we are well-to-do and there’s plenty in here.” At the same time, this act also symbolizes another deep-rooted value in Indian culture - that of generosity. The way our motherly figures literally force you to down a few more bites symbolizes that “There is enough and you can have more than you want. It’s all there for you.”
It is quite interesting how basic physical needs, over a period of time, form the fabric of a community’s culture. While in the West, the abundance of food, made it a hygiene need, in countries like India, the abundance of food could possibly signify prosperity.
Add comment May 10, 2008
My Very Own, Personal Jesus Christ!
I had read this piece recently where I discovered a new term “micro-boredom”. Its is basically about extremely small slices of life where one is ‘bored’ or has nothing to do. The article also goes on to talk about how technology provides a much needed escape route from micro-boredom, by filling in those small slices. If you think of it, a mobile phone offers you the privacy equivalent of being in a locked room. There is just very little distance between you and the screen of the phone to allow for intrusion. I have always thought that Indian youth are just so hooked on to their cell phones (always checking SMS, checking for missed calls, doing ‘nothing’ with the phone in a CCD) because of the sheer absence of privacy and personal space in our ‘other’ social life. Personal space is now the screen.
I have my own bouts of micro-boredom and when I think of it, I love the way various companies are tapping into my ‘nothing-to-do’ space. And, it’s far from being intrusive, but is actually quite helpful at times.
I use a Nokia E62 with Symbian O/S. It helps me check my company’s emails (MS-Exchange) with Mail for Exchange and sync my phone calendar/tasks/contacts to my Outlook. Google went on to create a suite of service for the hand phone. So, I can check my Gmail, add reminders to the calendar, watch Youtube videos suited for mobile phones, catch up on Google News, check out my Google Docs and catch up with my favourite feeds using Google Reader. They even created a handy application for Google Maps, which you can download to your cell phone. It is really useful - so when I have to find out where my hotel is located in Mumbai, I know where to look for it! Then, somebody realized that there has to be a better way to browse the net on a small screen and we got Opera Mini. Ideal for browsing, Opera Mini optimizes the internet for your cell phone. I use it to update my Twitter status; send private messages over Jaiku and connect with people on LinkedIn. It also has a feed aggregator and easy management of favourites. Yahoo Go puts in a host of Yahoo services in your palms - push email, weather updates, news, calendar and of course, Flickr. I browse through my albums, catch up on old times and share a laugh with myself at times. Then there is WidSets. It allows me to add tons of widgets to my application window - Twitter, Gmail, Jaiku, Feed Reader, Weather, Sudoku and tons of other time-killing games. I also micro-blog at Tumblr. So, you have this cool application called Tumbla, which lets you post text, quotes and pictures to Tumblr. In the evening, when I get a message that I need to be in Delhi for an urgent client meeting, I use applications from Jet Airways and Yatra.com to book my flight tickets on the go. Did I mention that I like to track the stock markets? I use Markets on Mobile from Moneycontrol to get updtes on my portfolio and the markets in general. Sometimes, when I get up in the night, I even use it to see how the US markets are doing! Whenever I feel the urge to chat up with a friend, I log onto my Gtalk / Yahoo Messenger. There are tons of options for this like Talkonaut, Morange among others. Though multiplex movie tickets are pretty steep these days, whenever I feel like I use the application from Book My Show to book movie tickets. What’s more, it even allows me to choose the seats of my preference. Oh yes! I swear I use my phone to talk as well.
So the other day, someone asked me “Don’t you get bored staying by yourself?” Nah! No way! Micro-boredom has evaporated into thin air! My phone is my saviour - my very own, personal Jesus Christ.
Salvation lies in your hands!
Add comment March 22, 2008
The Next Wave of Managing Customer Relationships
When I look at the companies across the service sector, I realize that most of these companies in businesses like telecom, banking, insurance, retail etc. have made considerable investments in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and continue to do so as I write. When I think of it, I realize that most CRM applications capture and report what a company knows about its customers. It monitors transaction data, market research data, website click-throughs etc. to give inputs on cross-selling and bundling of products with those with lower demand. It tells you to place diapers next to the beer rack in a retail store. It tells you that a particular mobile phone subscriber is not sending enough SMS messages and rolls out an offer to him to incentivize or create triggers for using this service more frequently. It tells a bank that a ULIP-based insurance buyer might also be interested in mutual funds. So much for number crunching and data-mining. But, I still feel that this is a reactive approach and is a lagging indicator of future business performance.
What companies need to work on is Customer Experience Management or CEM, which I believe is a more cost-effective and transformational approach. Put simply, Customer Experience is the response customers have to any direct/indirect contact with a company i.e. customer touch-points like stores, branches, website etc. Interactions with the touchpoints shape the perceptions about what a customer thinks about the company. CEM borrows from ‘voice of customer’ research to come up with insights about how the company performs on each customer touch-point. Since CEM focuses on how customers feel about the company and captures ‘emotions’ rather than ‘rationality’, it is a potential leading indicator of business performance. After all, the ‘economic man’ or the ‘rational consumer’ is resting in a grave. Purchaing decisions are increasingly governed by emotions. For instance, how many customers can discern the difference between Nike and Adidas shoes or why does a customer pay a premium to shop at a particular departmental store. CEM can throw up interesting insights about how is the company performing on each touch-point and what fine-tuning is required. And if you are able to slice the data by channels/locations/branches/stores, you have all the information about how the touch-points need to be refined at a local level apart from the enterprise level process changes. This surely is the next phase of managing customer relationships and creating advocates for the brand.
Of course, companies will take time migrating to this new approach because of the huge investments that they have already made in expensive CRM stuff and they need to show the return on it. But, the smarter ones will transition and start using CEM in combination to deliver value and create positive relationships with customers.
2 comments June 15, 2007
Utility Cooks
Indian mothers are a special group of people. They are dexterous, diligent and shoulder a variety of household responsibilities like managing the finances, getting the linen clean, cleaning the house, packing off kids to school, helping them with the homework and, most importantly, cooking. Household involvement of mothers of people in the age-group of, say 18-35, is very high because most of these mothers do not work or have a job. Not being the wage-earner, their role is limited to the household chores. I like to call this group of mothers as the Great Indian Mothers.
Whenever I meet a Great Indian Mother, I realize a striking similarity - all these mothers can cook very well and cook a wide variety of dishes right from pav-bhaji to dosa, chole-bhature to naan-matar-paneer, savoury sweets to namkeens, golgappas to pizza and so on. The main responsibility of the mother being the household chores and, in particular, khana-peena, the mother tries to do a really good job of it, thus cultivating versatility in them. They don’t want the family to have a routine dose of carbohydrates and proteins, instead they go all-out to ensure that ghar ka khana is good fun. These thoughts and virtues are clearly an outcome of focus and responsibility.
The other day, while having dinner with a friend in a small dhaba (I have been eating outside for about 18 years now - an outcome of staying in hostels, paying guest etc.), I wondered if I stand any chance to enjoy ghar ka khana, once I get “settled down”. Going back to my earlier post, where I talked about how people would get busy in their work lives and have no time for marriage or kids, I felt that my chances were, at best, minimal. As we move towards a socio-economic setup, where more and more women enter the Indian workforce, I see the “versatile cook” heading towards a slow, but sure, extinction. As women start shouldering financial responsibilities and managing their careers, focus on the household would be divided. I do not intend to say that the underlying inclination to get involved in household work, in particular cooking, would decline. Women, by cultural programming, are attuned to take on these responsibilities, but they would be constrained to do so in the future. So the future mothers residing in urban India, who work and shoulder financial responsibilities, will turn into “Utility Cooks“.
They would know to cook only routine fare (chaawal-dal-roti et al) to feed the household. They would not have the time to develop versatility in cooking. Whenever the family feels a need to indulge in variety, they would go to eateries to savour gastronomical delights. There will be a complete division of labour, where the task of cooking delicacies will be largely outsourced to more specialized participants in the economy.
2 comments September 4, 2006
LINK: Living-In-No-Kids
As more and more Indians get educated and move to cities and as they become upwardly mobile, I feel there will be a new group of people called LINK or Living-In-No-Kids.
It will be a long time for this group of people to become significant in mass, but it is coming for sure. As the country inches towards development, more and more men and women are likely to get jobs and become independent of the family tutelage. Plus, with so many young people working and living independent lives, the institution of marriage will weaken as a result of conflicting priorities, limits on one’s time and work pressure. Moreover, unquestionably the propensity to ‘mingle’ with the opposite sex is going to grow at an increasing rate because of the centuries of confinement that Indians were subject to and the natural tendencies of humans to mate. Finally, let’s come to kids and population growth in India is slowing down gradually and will continue to do so due to penetration and efficacy of various contraception techniques. These techniques will be widely accepted by the upwardly mobile, independent people, who would not want additional responsibilities of a child in the face of ever-increasing pressures of life and distance from the family system. So, we might have a situation where people want to mingle, but don’t essentially want any hang-ups. Thus, the concept of no-strings-attached relationships or live-in’s will gain ground.
1 comment August 31, 2006
SIN IS IN!
In my last post, where I wrote about the possible reasons for creating the concepts of heaven & hell, I had briefly mentioned that heaven and hell give us broad buckets to classify human conduct. They represent age-old human tendancies to pass judgements about life around us. However, things are changing a bit. The ’sinner’ is no more sinful. His acts are no longer looked down upon. The ’sinner’ is no longer the bad guy, which the earlier moral society had branded him as. SIN IS IN!
Welcome to the new world, where sin thrives and in more ways than one, is admired and craved for. Look around you, and you find all kinds of sin which our society advised us to abstain from.
Take a closer look at the dessert above…and you have already started making love to it in your mind. You imagine how you would savour the taste, caress the cream, lick the oozing hot chocolate and gratify your soul in the aroma. But, we were asked to abstain from such pleasure and thoughts.
Or look at these images…
The colour ‘black’ is traditionally associated with gloom. In certain cultures, it is associated with nothing less than death. Black is supposed to be the antithesis of nature. It was evil. It was harsh. But these images (and others around us) clearly show the paradigm shift in the way we interpret black. Black is beautiful now. And it is sleek and sexy too. Look into any closet and you find a black apparel. I don’t think we can live without black. Black is life!
There is no paucity of examples. Self-indulgence. Large bar of chocolate. Double helping of the dessert. Two burgers. Loads of fries. Extra masala. Spa. Aromatherapy. ’Spice’ body wrap massage. Sex-appeal enhancing perfumes. Unnatural weight-loss. Unnatural figure enhancement. Inebriation. Throwing up. Clothes with an oomph factor. Low neck-lines. High hem-lines. The little bikini. Cosmetics. The purple lip gloss. Colours. Make ‘em brighter. Tattoos. Wet-look effect. Late night parties. The ‘f*** you’ attiude. Flaunting what you have. Flaunting what you don’t have. The “No Arranged Marriage” syndrome. 10 affairs before marriage. 20 after the marriage. Live-in’s. Super-spicy gossip. Dropping your jaws when you saw him/her. Adult content on TV. Adult content in life. Sex. More Sex. I can do with a little more. Gimme more…Enough is not enough. Keep on pouring.
Welcome to the brave new world of Sin. It’s a free world. It’s a liberal world. A world that has utter disregard for conformance and repects individual dispositions.
Long live ‘SIN’ and may our souls soak forever in it!
6 comments August 26, 2006
No Holi for Me….Not so Easily Atleast!
I agree that this is a little late, but I really felt tempted to write on Holi. I am proud to have played the festival of colors – Holi with a very large and heterogeneous sample of people. Having completed most of my education in residential institutions, I got an opportunity to celebrate the festival with people from a diverse socio-economic and geographical background. Over the years, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. I have found people who would instantly show reluctance when an advance is made to ‘color’ them. They would typically use lame excuses like- they are allergic to chemicals, their ‘glowing’ skin would get tarnished or more simply they just don’t relate to the concept of celebrating a festival with colors. However, ‘hungama’ prevails and the reluctant person is pulled in to play colors.
The most interesting thing that I have noticed is that – it is these ‘reluctant’ people who are the most vibrant and enthusiastic lot when it finally comes to playing Holi. Once they start indulging in colors, any trace of reluctance simply vanishes! What could be the possible reasons behind such a reaction? I realize that this is an act of according oneself self-importance. The act of reluctance is a proclamation that – I am not so easily available to everyone; I am not just another simple person. It’s the hidden desire to feel significant that probably causes individuals to behave this way. It is a very strong and distinct attempt to portray one’s individual identity in a differentiated manner because the person refuses to act like a ‘me-too’.
1 comment March 17, 2006
The Remote Banking Proposition
Its a well-known fact that Banks can reduce their operating costs by reducing the number of branch transaction and delivering their offerings through alternative channels like phone-banking, ATMs, online banking etc. Here’s an extract from an ICICI report (slightly dated):
“In India, the experience of ICICI Bank also confirms that transaction costs can be significantly reduced if transactions are moved from branches to ATMs, call centre or the Internet. The transaction cost for a branch is estimated at Rs. 34 ($0.68), Rs. 28 ($0.56) for call centre and Rs. 20 ($0.40) for an ATM. Acknowledging this fact, ICICI Bank has leveraged these new technologies to move transactions away from the branches.”
It makes perfect sense for providing the right kind of incentives for consumers to utilize alternative delivery formats. But, banks face critical challenges in ’selling’ and leveraging the Remote Banking proposition.
–> Firstly, a significantly large number of Indians are averse to the idea of transacting on the phone or internet. It’s the ‘Touch and Feel’ factor, stupid! There is a low level of trust in transferring funds to another bank account through the internet. After all, who do I hold responsible, if there is a goof-up!! How can I buy insurance/mutual funds over the phone? How can I give my credit card number to someone I can’t even see? Wherever money is concerned, Indians are really very conservative and apprehensive. Perhaps, its the collective programming of our minds over centuries that make us so attached to family silver. An attitudinal change is imperative.
–> Secondly, let’s say that a large number of Indians get rid of their apprehensions and embrace the remote banking proposition (although the ATM, phonebanking phenomenon is largely restriced to urban area), what do banks plan to do about service levels? My personal experiences with ATMs started with a satisfied feeling of convenience and quite quickly degenerated into waiting endlessly in queues for my chance to interact with the ’smart’ teller. Or, llistening constantly to “Your call is important to us; one of our phone banking officers will attend you shortly.” It almost seems like a eternal wait!!
–> Human error is something that banks cannot afford. In the quest for eliminating standard human errors, banks invested in IT systems, mechanical CRM techniques, complex algorithms etc. They definitely help in smoothening out remote banking transactions. But, in this quest, banks took out the human touch which is so essential to the business of banking. The business of banking is based on trust and humans (despite all the differences we have with other human beings) trust people and not machines. Solutions of a pure technical nature do not strike the best of emotional bonds between a brand and its customers. The human touch is essential. A proper mix of remote banking and branch banking is called for, while squeezing costs from other areas of operations and the core business.
The banking sector is all set for a high growth trajectory. Consumerism is on a high, Indians are shunning their negativity about credit, cashless transactions are on a rise and earnings are surging. Amidst this postitive scenario, banks should focus on winning loyalty of their customers. Understanding their needs, attitudes and emotional response to interactions with the banking channels is paramount. Loyal customers are not only more profitable, but are also more likely not to fall prey to price cuts by competition. Such customers are more likely to tolerate small goof-ups; they ‘understand’. They do more business with you and generate a positive word-of-mouth. Its only a set of loyal and emotionally satisfied customers that would enable banks to ‘pull’ new customers rather than having a swarming army of DSAa and their employees walking on the streets offering ‘free’ credit cards and ‘lowest’ rate on personal loans!
Add comment January 21, 2006
