Customer service

Last week while flying Delhi-Jammu, I bought a toy for my niece on the airport and gave it to her. However, policeman stopped my brother on the boarding gate as the toy did not have a tag. I had already thrown the bill by then. Helpless i just took over the toy back to put in my bag as I was flying next flight.

One of the Indigo ground staff on the boarding gate noticing this, assured us to carry on to the shuttle bus and mentioned it will take him just one minute. Thereafter he took the toy, ran back to the scanning machine, got a tag, got it scanned, got it stamped and got the toy back for the baby before the bus left from the boarding gate. Now that's a lot of effort for good customer care and is worthy of appreciation.

Who says, there is not much budget airlines can do to differentiate!

Electronic Menus in restaurants-I

You enter a restaurant and take seat. On the table you have a touch screen probably double the size of a PDA(yes, smaller than the one displayed on the left). You open it and see various options available to you.
Food
Drinks
Music

Assuming you choose 'food' and you get options ranging from Chinese, Muglai to Thai and whatever you normally get to see in a restaurant. Just read the customer comments and ratings for each of the delicacies as rated by so many customers who would have tried them, loved them and hated them and you could probably choose from the best rated to weirdly commented.

How about the item you heard from your friend he said tastes good? You might want to check out how have others rated it and what do they say about it. Put it in the search option available to you on the top of your screen(powered by none other than Goggle).

You liked it! But then you like it low salt, low oil, spicy etc. You choose from the options of various degrees for each ingredient of the dish.

You choose your drinks, food and confirm your order. Pops up the screen letting you know the time you will have to wait for that chilled drink to quench your thirst or satiate your palate.

Now when you have had a nice time with your family so you don't call the waiter who could take a few minutes to come over and then do the whole money exchange thing(of course not necessary). Just look at the right side of the menu there is swipe machine integrated in your touch screen. You swipe your card enter the amount of your bill which was displayed as soon as you pressed that red "bill" tab - I know you hate it. Oh you don't use credit cards! Just press the "cash" tab next and that same waiter who served you appears in less than a minute with all the possibilities of the change that he may have to give you back. In the meanwhile you could have added your ratings and comments on what you liked and what you did not.

By the way you like music when you go out for a fine meal, don't you? You could have chosen your pick from the music library that was available to you right from your touch screen.

You just had your fine meal in restaurants that could be the future.

Suggesting or insisting

On the FC Blogs, after reading Innovation: Lessons From a Car Shopping Experience, I had made a long comment. Longer than some of my own blog posts, so I thought of posting the same comment here too.

My comment was "Pushing a customer to alternatives of the product which the customer is looking for is definitely not going to help. In fact it will have a negative impact even if the dealer is suggesting a superior product at whatever price.

But, I think there is a finer line between insisting and suggesting. Suggesting is not a bad thing if properly dealt with.

In today's world with internet though most of the customers come with as much knowledge of the car as the sales representative at the dealer, still there are customer's who are not exactly sure what they are looking for. They have plain aspirations and that is where suggestive approach can help.
Again there has to be a strong restrain from making that suggestive approach into an insistence.

In this case you as a customer had very clear priorities and understanding, where the best a dealer could have done was answer all your questions and be obliged to meet your requests.

But, an attitude of suggesting superior product, lower prices, alternatives should have been the approach only after understanding what the customer is looking for i.e. after getting to understand a little more about the customer."