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.
The respondents – a large proportion being the frontline customer contact people – were fully assured of the anonymity of their comments. The interviews, mostly one-to-one, and lasting about 60 to 90 minutes, were candid enough to bring out the real feelings of those who are responsible for delivering what is promised by their respective companies. I provoked people and sought supporting logic both for positive or negative reactions.
The VOICES, transcripts of which are the mainstay of this book, belong mainly to the frontline employees who interact with the customers day in and day out. If, instead of ‘reading’ these VOICES in cold print, you were to listen to the spoken words you would find various shades of emotions behind each statement. You would variously sense a feeling of honest pride, cautious exuberance, blunted candour, casual indifference, and not-so-covert anger But, above all, the VOICES reflected an enduring hope
Superior service has a fairly high content of discretionary effort on the part of employees and if the employees have to put in more than 100 % effort in their respective tasks they have to feel fully ‘engaged’ at an emotional level. For the frontline customer-contact employees this is possible only if there is assured internal support in full measure. To get people to put in strive efforts requires inspired leadership not only at the top level but also at the middle level of the organisation. With almost 80% of the people in an organisation reporting to the middle managers, quality of delivered service is highly influenced by the quality of leadership these managers provide.
I could sense that many of the respondents spoke from their heart. After all, while they wanted to put their best foot forward for their company they also wanted to protect their own self-esteem.
It is for this reason that I attach considerable importance to a fairly large collection of multiple VOICES which provided the primary resource material for me to work on.