Degrees of customer centricity in today’s business world

Born in the 70’s, “Customer is King” was the business mantra I grew up listening to. But it no longer seems to be the case. While the advent of Internet has been the biggest disruptive force to hit the world of business, there is a lot more behind the journey of the business world to where it is now.

There are two factors to be clearly understood and even wary about when driving a business enterprise to it’s success – acceptance and adoption. In the brick and mortar model of business, it is extremely difficult to foresee changing customer preferences or what factors would drive customers to change their preferences. A simple example is the Indian film industry. A commercially successful movie was supposed to have a certain number of action sequences, songs, dance scenes, emotional scenes and comedy. It was the blueprint for success in Bollywood (and still is in some regional film industries) until a first time director (Farhan Akhtar) shattered the stereotype in 2001. It was the fear of acceptance that had kept Bollywood from evolving out of the rut it got stuck in. Same was the case with the world of business as well. The same fear of acceptance kept Kodak from disrupting it’s own business model by embracing the digital camera before it was too late.

The increased adoption of technology in business made collection of data from business easier and software applications made it possible to collate data from different business segments, analyze them and understand what factors are driving businesses up and down. Adoption of the internet and the advent of eCommerce finally broke the fear of acceptance and adoption as online stores does not even cost a fraction of the brick and mortar ones.

One fear gave way to a new one – customer support and satisfaction. As customers started adopting to technology and accepting new and radical products, it became imperative to measure and understand how satisfied the customers are. Back in 2004, my life was meandering through regular IT support jobs when I was hired for the project of a European client, at a time when I had no idea that IT support services were getting outsourced. One incident changed my professional life and helped me understand my way ahead. One of the client’s software applications had stopped working and it was reported to the support team I was part of. We worked on the issue as per the priority on which the issue was reported. When we informed the client that the issue was resolved, we got the feedback that what we worked on was an invoicing application and in the time we took to resolve the issue, they had lost a number of orders. The problems associated with it were manifold. Poor understanding of client’s business applications, wrong prioritization of their issues, all of these stemmed from the lack of understanding of client’s business environment and their requirements which led to the support team working on an issue with no understanding of its business impact.

In my next job, I worked on a product in a client’s environment for more than 2 years and was able to create a new system design for the product’s upgrade in a few hours, not merely because of my knowledge of the product but because of my understanding of the client’s business environment and the needs of its different business units. When I was sent to a client’s premise in the UK as the leader of a team for a large transition program, what was important to me was to understand the client’s business environment and what technical issues were currently affecting the client’s business. As the client’s entire IT activities were getting outsourced to the company I was working for, it was just commonsense for me to understand and resolve existing issues before owning the responsibility of the environment.

That was back in 2010 and technology has come a long way from that time. This is the age of AI and Analytics and putting them together has resulted in predictive analytics which is helping businesses to take informed decisions and make successful plans for their future. But how much of all of these have filtered down into the traditional brick and mortar stores? At home, we buy groceries on a monthly basis from a grocer we have been customer of for 15 years. For daily purchases, we go to a nearby supermarket store. There is a particular pattern to the items we buy from the supermarket store, like milk, eggs, bread, etc but more importantly there is a pattern to the items we do not buy, like cooking oils, pulses, rice, wheat, soap, etc. No one in the store has asked us yet where we buy these items from. To be successful in business in these times, companies have to be at the top of their game and continuously keep looking for opportunities to be innovative to not only attract new customers but to retain them as well.

I received a call from an aspiring startup’s co-founder some time back for advise. They were planning to create an online platform from where anyone could place an order for any item and they would deliver it. The word anyone was a concern for me. There is a very good reason why India will never be a completely digital market – people’s purchasing power or the lack of it. A big chunk of its population of people make their daily purchases on debt. The local grocers keep accounts of these purchases and people keep paying as and when they have money with them. Even the local restaurants in many places especially the smaller eateries do the same. This is a business model supermarket stores can never replicate and hence they can never erode the relevance of local grocers and small time traders.

This is an important reason why the India government’s decision to demonetize its currency notes has destroyed India’s economy as it has further weakened people’s buying ability. When I mentioned these aspects to the startup’s co-founder and asked him how he was going to tackle them in his business model, he had no answer. Borrowing or getting inspired by a business model in another country is fine, but there can be no excuse to not knowing about their own country’s business nuances.

As products and companies of all sizes throng the online market and jostle for space to find their feet, nothing is more valuable in business now than customer loyalty and repeat customers. One look at Amazon’s fulfillment center (https://gadgets.ndtv.com/videos/behind-the-scenes-at-an-amazon-fulfillment-centre-521443) is enough to understand the complexity of its customer-centric business model. More than the number of its business segments, what is mind boggling is the fact that an individual could be its customer in multiple business segments and would expect the same level of customer service across all business segments. Multiply this by the probability of doing business with a few thousands or a million such concurrent customers and maintaining the highest quality of service across business segments is beyond comprehension.

Is customer still the King or has business become the Emperor of the King?

Death of an actor and media’s insatiable celebrity frenzy

Two days back I started the day with the big breaking news that celebrity Bollywood actor Sridevi had passed away the previous night. Initially I thought it was a hoax news as such news of the deaths of famous Hollywood actors keep coming up on social media but then TV news channels started confirming the news. It was first reported that she died of cardiac arrest but yesterday, the entire narration took an abrupt turn. Autopsy reports confirmed that she had died of “accidental drowning”. For the past two days, news channels have been salivating over her death and have become her propaganda machines. Nirav Modi has been buried and forgotten and they do not even seem to care what else is happening in India and the world.

Sridevi was a commercially successful actor whose acting for me was over the top at her best. She started acting at an early age in South Indian movies and moved to Bollywood as her stature grew. She was popular at the time when serious actors like Shabana Azmi and Smitha Patil were doing wonders in the parallel world of art cinema and Sridevi was no match to their acting abilities. She had 3 distinct looks across her career. The purely South Indian look she had when she started off was significantly altered to fit into the glamorous Bollywood roles she used to revel in. In her most recent avatar, her face looks drawn and haggard, a la Michael Jackson in his last times.

Movies can be categorized broadly into entertainers, ones that highlight social issues and ones that create social impact. Then there was another divide, the urban and the rural class. Movies were made either for the urban or the rural class. Each movie style had it’s own staple menu as well. Into all of this came the movie Dil Chahta hai in 2001 in which all the 3 categories were so skillfully interwoven by Farhan Akhtar that even though Dil Chahta Hai was a completely city based movie, it found success among the rural class as well. The after effects of the movie has not only persisted in Bollywood but has permeated across all regional movie industries and transformed movie making as a whole in India.

Movies make revenue in millions and billions of dollars these days. People spend so much money watching movies and what do they get in return? Secret Superstar, a recently released movie was made at a budget of Rs. 15 crores and reportedly earned Rs. 900 crores at the box offices across the world. No movie has ever been made with a ROI of 6000%. It tells the story of a 15 year old girl born into an extremely orthodox Muslim family who aspires to be a singer interwoven exquisitely with domestic abuse. Now what is the marker of it’s unprecedented success? In China, cases reported of domestic abuse dramatically increased after the movie was released. This is how movies should connect with people and this is the essence of movie making.

Sridevi was never really part of meaningful or socially relevant movies. Neither her movies nor her style of acting would have been successful at any other times. Himmatwala, one of her successful movies from 1983 was remade in 2013 with different actors and it was a commercial disaster. She even reportedly asked for a monstrous amount to be part of the Bahubali franchise. Her face has looked gaunt and haggard in the last few years, probably because of all the chemicals she had to use to look glamorous for so many years and maybe because of her luxurious lifestyle which became even more clear when it was revealed that alcohol traces were found in her blood.

There is a reason why mainstream media is glorifying her in spite of all of this. For a day, they bombarded the people’s psyche with information about cardiac arrest and hospitals because rumors abounded that she had died of a heart failure. A day later their narration quickly switched because autopsy reports revealed that she had died of drowning. I don’t understand why they cannot wait for the facts to come out before they report incidents. People love speculations and gossips and news channels thrive on these to improve their TRPs. People are mesmerized by all the glitz and glamour of the celebrities and media uses this to report about them to the people which satisfies everyone. The celebrities get to remain in the limelight and attract people to them so that people spend more money to watch their movies. People get to be entertained with celebrity lives and gossips. Media gets everything else. No wonder people have become media’s best commodity and their money making machine.