What is common to dealing with a king and a child? Both need
to be made to feel special. However, that’s where the similarity ends. The
difference lies in the feelings we carry towards a king or a child. For the
king, the reason for making them feel special could be anyone of reverence, deep
respect, convenient political correctness, vested motives or plain fear. In the
first two cases, the drivers are positive feelings while the in last two the
drivers are negative feelings. Quite clearly, we do not always treat someone
like a king for the right reasons. In contrast, the reason why we want to make
a child feel special is sheer love, compassion and goodness.
Pampering is essential to customer delight. But blind
pampering is detrimental both to the parent and the child. The parent stretches
without commensurate value creation, while the child gets spoilt. Therefore
when parents deal with children the focus is the child and his/her best
interest. When subjects deal with kings, the king is the façade but focus is
the self as the objective is to get the best out of the interaction.
To extrapolate this analogy to treating customers, the customer is king philosophy is transactional and zero-sum; and hence inherently unviable (either for customer or for service provider). While customer is a child philosophy is based on character and compassion; and it has a potential to lay the foundation of longer term win-win partnerships.
As I see, Customer is the King is passé, instead Customer is
a Child is apt. Which implies, the customer, like a child, needs to be made to
feel special (listened to, made to feel special, given the space to take
critical decisions) – but also needs to be cautioned wherein we judiciously
disagree and take tough unpleasant calls which are in the interest of the
customer. One-tracked pampering (giving in all and sundry customer requests) can
lead to fragile quick-fixes that boomerang badly both for the customer and the
vendor.
In the long run, adding to value to a client is the only sustainable
strategy – not making them happy every moment. Like in a game of chess, we have
to sacrifice short term goals in the interest of broader objectives. As an
example, in the case of a project, the overall success of the project is more
crucial than being in agreement with the client in all meetings. At the end,
the client will evaluate the service based on project success and not based on
how many times we were together in the same side of a discussion.
True,
treating customers like a child certainly needs more knowledge, better skills,
greater patience and a deeper understanding of client needs to make it work.
There lies the opportunity. The most valuable reason, why we need to use our
discretion as to whether we need to pamper a client or whether we need to
educate, is that in such situations we stand out. Stand out in terms of both domain
knowledge and professional commitment. Those are the moments when (or after
moments) when we earn lasting trust, credibility, respect, relationships and
business.
Bhubaneshwar
Jun 29, 2013
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