Gopal K. Gureja has been closely associated with the management of customer-service all through his corporate career.
Way back, in the early 1960s, when the Indian companies were riding roughshod over helpless customers, Gureja, gave up a junior engineer’s job with Himachal Pradesh P.W.D. to start his corporate career with K. G. Khosla & Company – the first ever to start manufacturing industrial air compressors in India. Until it began to hurt badly, the company had remained totally indifferent to its customers’ persistent demand for after-sales support. Gureja himself had suffered from this company’s total apathy. As the first service manager, Gureja worked out a retrieval plan, got the managing director to endorse it, had the peer group emotionally involved and implemented the plan full force. With good service as its USP, the company virtually changed the rules of the game in the industry, got into a leadership position and stayed there till the late 80s..
Joining Wanson India (now, Thermax Ltd) as service manager in 1970, was another challenge of similar kind. With unequivocal management support Gureja began to genuinely act as a customers’ representative within the company. This attitude gathered emotional overtones and spread across the organisation. Over the years, this focus conferred on the company, the kind of image, we, in the management team wanted to build – a company fully responsive to its commitments. The company soon moved into the league of highly regarded organisations for innovation and customer consciousness. The annual rate of compounded growth that the company achieved year after year became the subject of a case study at the IIMA. The service engineers pulled themselves out of the cynical shell that restricted their potential to perform and grow. As a result, many of them rose to senior/top management positions. As Gureja moved on to manage new business divisions, importance of good customer service always remained under a sharp focus. As director in-charge of a business division and as member of the Total Quality Steering Panel at Thermax, Gureja played a significant role in implementation of TQM. He retired in 1996.
Gureja published his first book—Creating Customer Value—a book on the strategic importance of quality after-sales-service and the changing role of the service manager in 1997 (Tata Mcgraw-Hill). First of its kind written in the Indian context, the book made it to the Crossword best sellers list. The book also resulted in the Symbiosis Centre of Management and Human Resource Development (SCMHRD) deciding to include, Relationship Marketing as an elective subject in the MBA (Marketing) programme. Gureja was invited to help finalising the syllabus and he taught this subject at this business school for four years.The book was prescribed as a reference book. Gureja has written on various aspects of customer service for the Economic Times and other publications
Starting late 2007, Gureja was engaged in empirical research, to explore reasons for disconnects between customer care policy and practice even in well-meaning companies. The final phase of the research was concluded in early 2011. The findings of this comprehensive research have now been translated into a book—Organisational Schizophrenia—publishedbySAGE (2013). The details of the book as well as the book reviews are available on this and other sites.