Empowerment!

I have been going through a harrowing experience with an airline recently. I am a gold member in their loyalty program and have been religiously earning all my miles with them. Having accumulating enough miles to redeem a round trip, I called them to get my award tickets for a trip I plan to make next month. My sage of disappointment began right away.

I realized that they do not have a dedicated call center for the low-volume high value customers like me, who I presume will not exceed a few 100o in number. Thus each time I called, I was put on an average 30 minute hold before my call was answer. Also to my utter disbelief, I was told that the category of seats for award tickets were sold out, and we’re talking 2 months in advance here! I was not convinced and chose to lodge a complain through their website. I received a call the very next day from a “Guest Commitment Executive”. For some reason, she seemed to be in a real hurry to wind up the call, all that she said was that my complain had been resolved and that I was going to receive a call shortly from the loyalty program desk. In her parlance, a commitment for call back was in itself the resolution of complain. This time I flew off the handle, I put my utter disappointment on record. She had no choice but to promise that my complain will be taken up on high priority and that someone will call me at the soonest to resolve it. To this date the problem has not been resolved. My biggest grip is the fact that I didn’t see any trace of effort on the part of the airline to go the extra mile to retain the loyalty of one of their most premium customers.

When I was in the US, I have faced many service failures. But each time something went wrong, the company went all the way to retain my loyalty. There was this incident when I accidentally made an international call without using my calling card which ended up costing over $200. I hesitantly called AT&T to implore them if they would consider waiving off the fee. Without a moment’s hesitation, the call center executive waived the entire amount. I was shocked in disbelief by her heroic act of customer focus. I became a loyal advocate of AT&T for life despite being painfully aware of their lousy network because I know for sure that they will more than make up for it by their superior customer service.

Amazon is another brand that I passionately advocate. Once a hard drive I’d ordered online crashed suddenly leaving me in the lurch. I was in the middle of my MBA semester and couldn't afford even a few hours downtime. Without missing a beat, they shipped me the replacement drive the very next morning. They didn’t bother to even probe if my request was genuine. This made me an Amazon loyalist for life.

The common element in both these experiences was EMPOWERMENT. An employee at the lowest rung of the ladder was empowered to take such a bold decision on behalf of the organization. She didn’t have to waste time being caught up in the administrative quagmire in order to resolve my problem. These organizations didn’t become proactive by accident. They have taken the pains to systematically create the right climate and procedural framework to bolster such bold decision making. They have also instilled the value of customer service in each and every employee thus making them just as passionate about it as the CEO would be. So to summarize, the only way to attain and retain customer loyalty is by having a long term vision to engender a strong culture of service. Only then will companies be able to differentiate themselves and earn the love and loyalty of their customers for life.

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so"

-Mahatma Gandhi