Anil Alur » Customers,humans and robots http://anilalur.com Life is awesome... Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:36:33 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 en hourly 1 Customers,humans and robots http://anilalur.com/customershumans-and-robots/ http://anilalur.com/customershumans-and-robots/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:00:00 +0000 Anil http://anilalur.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/customershumans-and-robots/ Starting new things with my company Enlen. One thing we figured out during our long discussions was that customers are going to be our most important assets. The market is crowded and one thing that will make us a purple cow, will be our service to customers. Luckily for us,everybody in the team accepts this. No body has a second opinion. So the next obvious thing we had in mind was, to what extent can a company accept and delvier what a customer wants?
We have heard a lot of stories, jokes about a customer care executive getting confused, trying to calm down an angry customer and then when they put down the phone the executive either laughs or curses himself for choosing that job…. Now what exactly happened here? A disappointed customer ! Really bad thing for a business isn’t it? Often I have come across big companies, who really don’t think customer is a king. Say for example Reliance Mobile. They really don’t care if they loose one customers because they are big and loosing 600Rs per month is no big deal. They don’t seem to get it, do they? Customers are humans. They have emotions, they get angry when something goes wrong. Humans don’t want to interact with robots. How often have you come across IVRs that hide the human interaction asking you keep dailing numbers, throwing you from one invisible menu to another! Ah finally you found an option to talk a human being ! You ask him in a question, he searches his script and answers you. Search a script ??? Another robot!! Yes there is some guy behind all this, implementing IVR menu, preparing scripts and ultimately saving money for the company and getting an award. Oh yes he also drives away an existing customer and few potential customers who had plans to buy his product. Yes they are not visible in the company accounts, so he is safe, he is happy, his boss is happy,everybody is happy except the customer.

Ok now coming back to our plans to serve the customers. We are sticking to Zappos model. This is our customer policy.

  • No scripts, customers are humans so are we. If I don’t need a robot, my customers don’t need a robot as well.
  • Give the customer what he wants and if it matters give him more than he asks for. Even if its about loosing money now, this will help us make more in the future.


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