A Multi-Channel journey experience with a telecom service provider - I

Sorry for the delay in the post but as the intent of this portal is to only document positive and negative experiences, I could not find any worth while experience that I could share with my audience. That in itself speaks about the efforts enterprises are putting in bringing great customer experience :)

Coming to the main point, this is about the India's largest private communication service provider. I have been their customer at one point or the other. In my previous residence as a bachelor, I used to share home with other folks in order to save on our rent. In fact that home was a bachelor's abode for quite some time.

Internet is almost a basic necessity for people of my generation and as expected the home already had a broadband connection being used by folks already living in there. However, I came as a replacement for the guy who had installed this connection. Hence, as a honest customer, we thought of getting the contact details updated.

To my surprise, a change in name was chargeable though contact and email could be updated free of cost. As a professional in this field, I do understand the name dependency but still considering the Indian dynamics where most of the population is in young age group, I believe some flexibility should be introduced to ensure there is better transparency both for the enterprise as well as customers.

There is more to this whole scenario which I would continue in next blog post...stay tuned!

Banks..please know your customer in real sense!

Ok so I had given out a positive experience with the same bank in this post. Though the experience that I will share now also cemented my belief that providing a perfect Customer experience is still a distant dream.

The brand takes a beating for me whenever I get a call from agent claiming she is calling from the same bank and whether I would be interested in a credit-card ????

Ok to give some benefit of doubt, we can assume that the nos. probably would have been obtained from a third party and also the telemarketing is outsourced with no actual data shared by the bank.

So if that is the case, then the bank is really not doing a good job. At least, if not integrating the systems, it can ask agents’ company to have a diligent check before making repeated calls on the same number. After all, for the customer it is a touch point with bank and hence can break the positive experience.

How proactive alerts can be a good customer retention strategy - my personal experience

In my first job way back in 2006, I was issued a complimentary credit-card by the 2^nd largest private bank in India as I opened a salary account with them.

I am still holding the upgraded credit-card with the same bank apart from few bad experiences with the bank’s different products and services.

The key reason is an experience that touched me during my initial days with the credit-card.

I had used the credit-card for consecutive transactions for airline tickets on the same day. Thereafter, I got a surprise call from the credit-card rep to verify whether I was the one who had done it. This kind of experience exceeded my expectations at that point of time.

Good web site is a first step for better online customer experience

I have an account with the largest private bank of India. I was exploring options related to Fixed deposits. At a given point, I wanted to go back to the previous content and I could not locate any link for it.

I had to start way back from the left side menu. this led to me postponing my research and next action for some time later. This made me think that a lack of simple feature like adding a link to previous page can actually result is less time spent and probably also has the potential to reduce the actual volume of transactions. No wonder, why there is some much focus on User experience :)

It's the time of instant feedback!

I recently flew in one of the leading low-cost airlines of India last week and what I received from them was an email asking for the trip feedback.

I did not open the email. Reason? I did not have an extremely positive or negative experience with the airlines. With many emails cluttering the inbox, this definitely will not be in my priority. Result?