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This book was actually waiting to be written. The prompt was provided by a number of encounters I had while I tried to resolve my complaints with some of the well-known companies. They included a high profile bank, a  major automobile company, a top notch insurance firm belonging to a group known for its high degree of ‘business ethics’ and a housing bank. The details of these stories, which may well be called the ‘trigger stories’, are included in the book along with three other cases of first-hand experience.

The stories, by themselves are quite commonplace, reflecting usual mix of apathy, evasiveness,effort to out-smart the customer and wriggle out of a bad situation. I experienceda sponge-like behaviour while dealing with the people handling my complaints. I would plead and shout for resolution of the problem. Customer care associates would listen, and absorb with all the patience and feigned politeness, but I would see no meaningful action.

Most of the reasons for failing to deliver the promised quality of customer care come to mind straightaway. But I was keen to find how they actually come into play in day-to-day work and cause misalignment in policy and practice. Only experiential research involving people willing to share information quite candidly could provide these answers.

The research programme, with its first phase commencing in September 2007 and the final phase ending in April 2011, involved:

• Mostly, one to one recorded interviews with close to 200 people,
• Twelve different companies—Thermax Ltd,, ELGI Equipment Ltd., VIRGO Engineers Pvt Ltd,, and nine of their associate companies—Channel Associates and Dealers—and also some of their customers.
• Respondents handling different functions at different levels of hierarchy—field  engineers, area service managers, regional business managers, general managers, project engineers, sales executives, engineering managers, quality assurance chiefs, heads of Business Units, HR managers and other professionals involved in training and corporate regional managers.
• Presence as an observer, in a few review meetings,
• Study of various internal docu­ments and
• Attending some internal presentations.

R. Gopalakrishnan, Director, Tata Sons Limited

In the world of business and management, when considering subjects like quality and productivity, most people relate easily to products and less comfortably with services. The research literature, the pedagogy and the discourse are loaded in that way because that is the sequence in which manufacturing and services evolved. During the last two centuries, it was manufacturing that first displaced agriculture in the GDP basket. But during the last fifty years, as services have progressively displaced manufacturing in the GDP basket, the discourse has not quite changed in favour of services to the required extent.

Looked at in this perspective, Gopal Gureja’s well-researched book is well-timed as much as it is well-intentioned. He bemoans the striking gap between intent and execution when it comes to Customer Service Quality—and he is not referring to the situation in unknown, fly-by-night companies.

Policy-practice gaps occur substantially, because of:

• Organisationally induced distortion in perception of employees’ self-interest
• Overly obsessive pursuit of quantitative targets alone
• Absence of rigorous culture of discipline
• Mistaken notion that by outsourcing a task a company has also outsourced its responsibility towards the customer
• Lack of intense organisational  communication that should end up in visible change of behaviour
• Knowledge-at-the-point-of-action is what empowers the most
• Good complaint management is the heart of customer relationship management
• Quality of responsiveness impacts customer satisfaction the most
• Power of position must give way to power of purpose

• Chief Executive Officers (or Chief Enabling Officers!)
• Heads of Strategic Business Units
• Heads of various contributing departments
• Service/Customer Care Managers
• Other customer service professionals
• HR professionals
• The middle managers
• All the front-line customer contact employees—whatever title they hold

To preview some pages of the book follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Organisational-Schizophrenia-Customer-Service-Response/dp/8132109562/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416100953&sr=1-1&keywords=gureja

Contents:

Foreword:   R. Gopalakrishnan (Director, Tata Sons Ltd.) xv

Preface xix

Part I: The Promise 1

1.  The Upbeat Promises 3

2.  Gearing Up to Deliver 22

3.  Getting Employees Emotionally Engaged 49

Part II: The Performance 91

Preamble to Part II 93

4.  The Death of Common Sense 97

5.  The Merry-Go-Round 107

6.  Sheer Indifference 114

Copyright © Gopal K. Gureja, 2012All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 2012 by

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