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Executive Interviews: Interview with Subir Ghosh on Customer-centric Organizations
December 2010
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Your illustrious experience spawns
nearly 28 years in diverse industries
like consumer products, consumer
durables, and the telecom and retail
sectors. And all of them have been
highly customer centric. What
customer experience insights do you
think have all these years of
experience distilled in you?
The first and foremost insight is that
customer centricity starts with the
mindset of the leadership of the
organization. It must believe that
what is good for customers is good
for the organization and that meeting
and exceeding customer
expectations is the only path to
growth and profitability on a
sustained basis as the organization
exists only because it has customers.
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This is then backed by the belief that
external customer-centricity is
nothing but a function of internal
customercity, i.e., your team
members will enable customers only
to the extent to which they are
enabled by the organizations values,
policies and practices. Putting it in a
nutshell there would ideally be only
two kinds of roles in a customercentric
organization, ones that enable
the customer and the ones that
enable those who enable the
customer, all other roles must cease
to exist.
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Your experience also meant seeing a
metamorphic change in Indian
consumer and his/her mindset. Can
you take us through some of those
metamorphic changes?
The Indian customer like the Indian
citizen, is beginning to become
conscious of his ability to make a
difference to the fortunes of
organizations and the world and has
thus begun to demand that he be
taken seriously. With a huge
proliferation in brands and, thus,
choice combined with huge media
proliferation, organizations cannot
hope to cash in from the consumers
ignorance anymore. Nevertheless, he
is not as demanding as his western
counterparts owing to a large
number of customers being from the
lower socioeconomic strata who are
getting their first taste of branded
goods and services in most
categories and thus hold these
brands in awe and feel that the
organizations are doing a favor on
them by giving them access to these
goods and services, while in fact it is
the other way round and they are
doing a favor on the organization by
providing growth and profits to
these firms. But I am sure we will get
there fast especially with more
choices emerging in every single
category and with the initial sense of
awe and admiration wearing off the
customer would become more aware
of the promises being made in the
firm's communication messages and
what he is actually getting, added to
this he will have many more new
firms competing for his attention and
his business which will make him
far more conscious of his worth. He
will assert and demand much more
from the brands and the
organizations in the days to come.
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Why an exclusive Institute of
Customer Experience Management?
What are the unique features of the
Institute of Customer Experience
Management?
Our institution is dedicated to
applying the science of customer
experience to address the challenges
of growth and profitability for
organizations engaged in the service
sector economy. Having said that lets
just explain how we define customer
experience; customer experience,
according to us, is the sum total of all
interactions that a customer has with
a firm's products, processes, people
and the physical environment in
which it delivers the product/service
in. It produces a rational and
emotional response in customers
which either enhances the customers
bonding or loosens it with the
company and its products/services
and we all know what are the
commercial implications of these
outcomes.
Moreover, India today is fast emerging
as a service economy where the
service sector is the largest
contributor to the country's GDP and
interestingly the services business is
characterized by either a lack of the
physical product (or a token one at
best, example, a credit card or a
telecom sim card) or absolutely
identical products and brands
available with every player with
absolutely identical pricing (Colgate
toothpaste and other toothpaste
brands being available with every
retailer at almost the same price)
thereby making it very difficult to
differentiate the offering between
competing firms.
While all of them adopt different
communication strategies one must
understand that advertising at best
creates a promise, the fulfillment of
the promise happens only when the
consumer engages with firm and
experiences a dissonance or
consonance with the advertising
promise which is nothing but
customer experience. This is the
absolute moment of truth and unless
firms are deeply focused on
understanding and managing these
moments, there is no way it will grow
and become profitable.
Thus, the science of customer
experience is a make or break for
organizations not only in the services
sector but all the other firms as well
because customers don't buy
products, they buy solutions to their
life's challenges.
1.
The Multi-Branding Strategy Case Study
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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