How important is your customer and their comments!

How beautiful it is to have a large customer base? How difficult it is to maintain them? Every business attempts to claim a new set of customers in their own best ways. You may find these in corporate presentations:

• Customer is King
• Customer first
• Put yourselves in Customers' place
• Employees first, Customers second (with intention that well care taken employees would take care of customers)

These great ideas and thoughts are not meant main use-cases only, but also for an overall experience. Let me try illustrate this by an example.

I'm a regular user of cab aggregator service and had (rather, still have) a feel good factor in their service model. Until recently, I thought this was hassle-free fantastic overall experience. It is still hassle-free for basic use-cases. The happy paths or the basic use-cases of this service are the ability to provide a simple way to book a cab, to cancel a cab, to pay money to the wallet and to check wallet balance, to name a few.

This belief of technology enabled delightful experience took a slight hit recently. The trigger was simple - I was asked to pay in cash rather than through the mobile wallet. I had 4x times the amount in my mobile wallet and the driver demanded cash for some reasons of his own. I was unhappy about this and so raised a service complaint. Addressing grievances from the user is one of the adjacent services to the cab booking service (main use-case). It is not wrong to expect every user conversation to be hassle-free, technology driven and delightful too. I wouldn't have imagined that the complaint conversation will end up so trivial and mundane as presented below.

[Start]
XXXXX Rajesh,

Thank you for contacting XXXXX.
 
At XXXXX, we take feedback very seriously and would like to dig deeper on what went wrong with your experience. We are unable to trace your booking ID (XXX) with us against available details.
 
Request you to share your XXX, which was texted and emailed to you on booking confirmation.
 
Additionally, please share the email ID and mobile number you had used to make this booking which will help us get back to you at the earliest with a resolution.
 
Regards,
XXXX
Customer Support
XXXXX
[End]

Please note that I initiated this conversation from my registered email address. I started to wonder if these phrases - technology driven, smart cab aggregator have any meaning after reading this email. Isn't it funny to note that they do not have my mobile number, booking identifier and couldn't call me, when the main app itself is smartphone based?

The main and adjacent use-cases MUST offer the same experience to the user. The adjacent paths are more often less trodden and are close to the main application. Developers of these apps tend to offload this task to user and shoulder upon offline support models like toll-free numbers. Users do not use or see these paths most of the time, 'until a need' arises. How many times have you given a feedback about a driver in the old world? Now wouldn't you agree that you rate the drivers, because the cab aggregator forces you to provide a rating. I believe readers will acknowledge similar experience for adjacent paths with other providers. I've had my share with Internet service providers, telephone and mobile carrier services et cetera - closing the account, shifting house from one address to another to say some examples. Have you given a second thought while consuming their services after such an experience?

These adjacent paths must be given the same 'valued' importance and so attention. It is predominantly that these paths instill the negativity or the delight in the customers' mind. In this connected world, I think every single possibility of negativity needs to be addressed quick - otherwise you might get a blog like this and hit your prospective customer base! :-) Or you might get another competitor that improves upon this weakness exponentially great.

Contrast this with another experience - my Amazon Web Services free account had expired. I didn't really use it very well and so asked if this can be extended. I wrote an email to this effect and viola! I got an email followed up by a telephone call. At first, I thought they are going to say No politely. To my surprise, my request was satisfied and I got another year of extension. Regardless of that outcome, I think mere calling the user and listening to him/her instills the required confidence and support from your business. This sets an exemplary record to the motto's we acknowledged, that Customer is King! And let's not forget - Happy customers keep you in business (see how).