ZIP Telecom: Ringing in personalised programmes for customer loyalty

Tarun Narayan in Mumba

In an effort to improve customer service and create loyalty, ZIP Telecom has introduced a system of lending personalised solutions to customers. But what is making a novel difference is that employees across various levels of the company are being tuned in to achieve this, rather than just the marketing or service people. The approach of initiating a humanistic effort to solving customer problems is an action plan incorporating the trainees at the entry level to the vice-president of the organisation. All of them parallelly participate in delivering innovative solutions to some of the conventional customer complaints.

“All employees are stakeholders in the enterprise, hence collective organisational involvement in customer service is to make
them feel that much closer to the consumer and the end-customer the enterprise is serving. Till now, clients were far removed from the
concept of individualistic customer empathy with customers being mere account numbers and ID numbers to be processed on a database. But the present proactive move makes the challenge of sensitising with the customer psychography more live, instead of statistical interpretations of arithmetic data,” says
Mr Harish Bijoor, chief operating officer, ZIP Telecom.

According to Mr Bijoor, creating a challenge to cull out customer solutions by translating that as a common business imperative and hurdle to be circumvented by all employees, irrespective of rank and status, is a way of accelerating the drive of eliminating functional obstinacy from the employees’ psyche created due to rigid hierarchical gradations.

Mr Bijoor points to the issue of a particular one-touch button not working which was getting flossed over despite subsequent service visits conducted by the service person. However, when one of the senior professionals from the organisation went on a similar round, this got serviced in just a single visit.

“For the service person, this was one of the several issues to be sorted out hence it got neglected. For the employee, this was a key problem which he had to solve with extra urgency. For the employee the demand of maintaining the credibility of his organisation is far more pressing than an external service person,” explains Mr Bijoor.

Sometimes the solution to an individual problem is arrived at collectively. The employee has the freedom to liaise with the “right person” to solve the problem within the organisation. This could be a marketing person, a technical, a service or a finance entity.
“This way, the employee achieves cross-functional interaction to solve problems and does not follow the usual compartmentalisation approach,” Mr Bijoor informs.

For some of the best solutions that have been identified the reward is widespread proclamation of the particular initiative. If unique solutions are achieved, it is percolated through the mail system to all concerned. According to Mr Bijoor, open acknowledgement as a method of employee appreciation is the best way of developing a motivation-oriented reward structure.

“Monetary rewards are best avoided for such an effort, since genuine initiatives are to be boosted by lending a sense of emotional triumph more than a transitory monetary benefit,” he says.