My First Customer Service Strategy

Under Promise, over Deliver. Easy to say, hard to implement.

 I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs or businessmen. My father was a renowned and a successful doctor in a small town near Pune called Daund. He was someone I idolized as well as respected. His lessons on how being a good human being have always remained with me till date. He would always say, “Parag our traditions and customs tell us “Matru Devo Bhavo”,  to treat your mother as your first God, “Pitru Devo Bhava” , your father as the second, “Guru Devo Bhavo” , your teacher as your third and of course “Atithi Devo Bhavo”,  your Guests as your last God.” He would then say “For me, I say “Patient Devo Bhava!”

His simple explanation was that his patients are his God because they are his best teacher. He firmly believed and valued the practical knowledge he got from his patients than the bookish one that gathered dust after medical school. I think somewhere there was an internalization of this in my psyche from those days. I am however still working on whether one should really treat his customer his God or not. I feel that, that would be stretching it too far. I guess one can call customer’s your best experiential teacher.

I believe that businesses cannot be as noble as the medical profession. I would trivialize the matter by comparing them.

Trained with these noble thoughts, I started my small photo finishing lab on the third floor of nondescript building. My starry-eyed glass dreams were soon shattered as I sat in my ac office waiting for customers to just walk and hand me over their business! I had no customers for the first few months! Getting customers those days was hard as people were not experimental and fickle as they are now! Luring them with attractive offers or promotions was not an option for sustaining a loyal customer base.

I had to work very hard those days and taught myself every single aspect of my business right from how to raise an invoice, to a maintaining a sales register, a production and consumption report and even a wastage report. I also poached an expert in my industry from whom I learned the technical aspects. How I poached an expert makes an interesting story to which I shall do justice in a different blog!

After months of near bankruptcy and uncountable amount of hard, back braking work my business finally began to show signs of growth. Those days I had vowed that I would eat sweets only on the days on which I would get 100 films for processing. Back then the delivery of a processed film used to be 6 hours and it was a long laborious process. Armed with my first 100 films, on the day after the “Ganesh Chaturthi”, I decided to celebrate my victory with an ice cream party on the house for the staff.

Like most startups today, I too had popped the Champagne when the things were just about to go bad! Remember when things are going good always be on your guard! After the party, when we all got back to work we suddenly realized that we did not have the efficiency to deliver all the 100 rolls in 6 hours! I had not accounted for this as I had not done my ground work properly!

We were up the whole night processing those films. Even my front staff stayed behind the entire night to help finish the orders. At around 7 am, having worked all night, we had still not finished half our order! I and my staff simply didn’t have the physical stamina to continue. At 8 am which was our opening time, we had customers streaming in to collect their films only to be met by bleary eyed owner and staff and told that their order was not yet ready! That day we were like lambs in the slaughterhouse!

My customers looked something like this to me at the time!

Guilty and ashamed, we somehow managed to finished deliveries over the next 24 hours but we had lost our reputation in the market! The cost of over confidence can sometimes be much more than one estimates! All the hard work that I had put into building my brand in the last one year had simply been washed away in those two days! Not ready to give up and fold shop easily I wiped my slate clean and started all over again. It took us almost 6 months to win back their confidence and their business.

True that!

I had learnt my lesson by burning all my fingers following which I set proper systems in my startup. Here’s how we did it at Snap back then. I made a production chart given to the staff at my collection counter on a daily basis. The minute a film came in, the counter staff would estimate the delivery time based on the production chart and hand over receipt with the estimated delivery time to the customer.

The delivery time always had an additional hour added to it as a buffer in case of unexpected challenges like power failures etc. Whenever there was a power failure, the counter staff would then call the customer in advance, and inform the delay and apologize, and sometimes offer an extra discount or a photo frame.

Even though this added slightly to my costs, it is always better to tell your customer in advance about a failed delivery. No one likes surprises, least of all your customers, who expect nothing less than the highest standards from you even if they pay you peanuts for it.

But always remember, a happy customer is your best advocate! Customer Delight can give you more satisfaction from your business and can even bring in more business than any marketing gimmick or sales promotion.