The Remote Customer

Ever wondered not meeting your housemaid on a daily basis; just giving her instructions over phone or say SMS, or for the more technologically aligned ones, over e-mail, each day of the week for months and months together. Difficult, right?

Would you not be overwhelmed with anxiety about incomplete tasks, poor execution and thousands of other such things?

Now imagine a similar customer-provider situation and let’s just change the service to, say something like outsourced IT service or say, BPO. What do you think is more complex to execute? The tasks that you ‘outsource’ to your housemaid or the ‘multi-million dollar’ contracts that get awarded in the IT industry. While I don’t intend to demean the effort of a housemaid, what I think requires tighter execution, is the latter.

What actually the housemaid is doing, is providing you a service, and you are her customer. When would you be comfortable with the ‘remote’ housemaid? Maybe if she provides you an update every now and then; keeps you informed about what is done and what is not done at regular intervals; or say, provides you a feel by sending you photographs of her progress as status updates on facebook. Yes! Now the ‘remote’ housemaid looks practical.

That’s exactly what a ‘remote customer’ is looking for – communication, communication and communication. Best, better, good, bad, worse, worst - in whatever shape or form, information is the key. There are many questions that go over a customer’s mind during the period of silence (times when the provider is not communicating or is not in touch), such as
– “Is he working for me?”, “Is he working on my priorities?”, “Am I getting my money’s worth?”, “What is the value he adds to my business?” and so on. The only way a provider will be able to answer these ‘unasked’ questions is by talking; by
providing as much information as feasible.

Communication, rather over communication, is the key to new relationships. There is a need to create a mutual buy-in, an acceptance for the provider and an environment of trust, to take the relationship beyond the contract. It is important to make the relationship so strong that the only reasons the contracts are pulled out are to check the renewal dates.

What causes most customer anxiety, unhappiness and dissatisfaction is not, not receiving the service or the product, but not being informed upfront that the service will be received in a specified form and at a stated time. Customer service, near or remote, is not about managing the customer or the product or the service, it is about managing customer’s expectation.

Tell what you will give, and give what you told you will. Would you not like it to rain when the weather office told you that it will rain? That’s certainty.

Over the years, thanks to the industry and technological advancements, I have serviced hundreds of customers just over phone or e-mails, not having met some of my customers even once. And the key differentiation between my good customers (who gave me a lot of business) and the not so good ones (obviously the ones who did not fill my coffers) has been my ability to communicate with them. Someone whom I kept better informed, talked more often to and invested more of my time in, was more satisfied, gave me more business and more profits. It could just be the chicken and the egg story - did the egg (communication) come first or the chicken (business). And that’s the business decision.

Let not the ‘remote’ customer remotely control you, instead change ahead of the customer wanting to change you. That way his ‘remote’ will never be used and you will always exceed the customer’s expectations. And how to do that? Simple! Communicate, so what if it is over communication.

Each time you think about not talking to the customer, think about the housemaid whom you never met.