 Let's now get into the components, the processes, and the tools of customer service, and I'll do a few case studies so that you understand some practical examples. So what are the components of customer service? Obviously, the first part of it is service delivery. You have to deliver the service, whether you're an airline, you have to fly, you are a restaurant, you have to serve food, if you are a movie hall, you have to show the movie, and if you're a product company, you have to be able to deliver the product. If you're an e-commerce site, you have to take the order and deliver the product. So whatever be it, the first component is service delivery. But associated with service delivery is the service quality management. Am I doing it well? What is my failure rate? Is the customer happy? So if you're a movie hall, is my movie starting on time, ending on time? Is the movie hall clean? And then if you are an airline, is the flight taking off on time? What's the punctuality record? Are the aircrafts clean? Is the food good? And same with products. If the product is being delivered to a customer, is it in good shape? Is it nice? Is it clean? Is it new? Or is it old and dirty? So service delivery, service quality management. We'll see some examples soon. But things go wrong. So customers complain 1%, 2%, 5%. There will be complaints. Product was not good. Service was not good. This did not happen. That did not happen. So do you have a good mechanism to gather customer complaints and solve those customer complaints? And then escalation management means sometimes problems are not solved. So you have a problem with the bank. You as a customer have a problem with the bank. And the bank is not solving the problem. The branch is not solving the problem. Is there an escalation metrics which means can you go to hire up people? So in a bank, you can go from a branch. If the branch doesn't solve, you can go to the zonal office. They don't solve it. You can go to an ombudsman and so on. Same with government and private sector. I'll show you the examples later. But service is also about there being a contract. There's a contract between the customer and the company to get certain services. So if you buy a plane ticket, you will find lots and lots of pages of contract. If you buy a download an app on your smartphone or on your laptop, you probably don't read it, but there's a lot of contract. And you have to click on something called I agree with the terms and conditions. If you buy a refrigerator or a smartphone and there's a warranty, you'll find there's a lot of contractual obligation. You may not be reading them, but there is a contract. So that needs to be managed well. Then billing management. Is the pricing correct? If the pricing is incorrect, which means let's say the pricing is too low versus what it should be, the customer will be happy because he's getting a lower price, but the company loses money. But if it's higher than it should be, the company makes more money, but the customer becomes very unhappy because he's paying higher and he will complain. So these are some of the elements of customer service. Contracting and billing is extremely important because that drives the business and from a company point of view, it's a very complex procedure because if you have only one customer and you're selling only one product, it's easy. But if you have 10 million customers, 1 crore customers or 100 million customers or if you have a Facebook with billions of users or an Amazon, it becomes a very complex process. So Amazon may have billion customers and tens of millions of products to be delivered in millions of zip codes or pin codes. Look at the permutation combination, it becomes very complicated. And if one aspect goes wrong, that one customer will complain. So everything has to run well. What are the components of that? There has to be a customer master. The company has to keep track of all the customers. It may be hundreds, thousands, million, sometimes a billion. That's called customer master. There has to be billing accuracy. If you're buying something, the bill has to be accurate. Otherwise, either the company loses money or you as a customer are unhappy. There cannot be errors on the invoice. There's also a tax element to it. If there's an error in invoice, the taxing may be wrong. And the government may come after the company. There are also penalty and surcharges for complex products. So if you have, let's say, a service to build a bridge or build a building, so there will be penalties. Because in the contract, the government may say, if you delay it, beyond a certain time, you have to pay us penalty. So that also has to be managed. And there will always be exception management. So if you do 50,000 transaction, 49,900 are okay. Everybody's happy. But there may be 100 out of 50,000 which have gone wrong. Something has gone wrong. That's exception. That needs to be managed. And sometimes you have to keep track of problems that are not solved. And it has to be escalated to higher and higher and higher levels. And then there are add-ons. So you may buy a core product, but sometimes you get some add-ons with it. So if you buy a phone from, let's say, Amazon, you may buy some extra warranty. That needs to be managed. So that's an add-on service. You buy a refrigerator with an extended maintenance contract. That's an add-on. You buy a pen with some extra refills. That's an add-on. So you have to manage all of it. So that's the complexity of contracting and billing. And all of this comes under customer service management. And if you don't do this well, you will get into customer disloyalty. If you do this well, you create a great customer loyalty. Let's do a mini case with a company called DHL Express. DHL globally is about a $100 billion revenue group. It employs about 600,000 employees. It operates in 220 countries, or more than that. And one of the divisions is DHL Express, which basically is called also as a courier service in many parts of the world. An express or a courier service basically you use when you have to move something very urgently in a very time-defined way. For example, you want to mail a check to someone else, and it has to reach in one day or two days' time. So it's a valuable product, and it is time-sensitive. It has to reach within a certain time. Then you use a courier service. And all of you would have used a courier service sometime or the other. And DHL Express is one of the largest express service providers in the world. And it's very big by far in India. So let's look at that case study. And everything that I'm showing you here is in the public domain. It's either in the website, the DHL Express website, or if you search for it and you click on the link that's on the website, you'll get access to this, what I'm showing you. So the core of service delivery of DHL Express is a fleet of vehicles. It could be planes, because remember, you could be shipping a product. It could be a visa application, some document, or a trade document, or a small parcel, a gift from, let's say, Mumbai to Delhi or Delhi to Chennai. You could be shipping it from India to US, or it could be going from US to Japan. And for long distance, you need a fleet of aeroplanes, because the product here is moving the goods, important goods in a time-sensitive way. So aeroplanes, which move the products fast. But the aeroplanes will not go home to home. So you need a whole amount of supporting infrastructure and you can see this on the site and this is on the website. You can click on the link below. So that division has got 120,000 employees. They service 500 plus airports. They have got three million customers. And they service 140,000 service points, and so on. And they're using 300 dedicated aircrafts and use 3,500 facilities. Why am I showing you this? So that you understand the backbone of service delivery. Because for you and me, it is I go to a DHL Express counter and I give them a document which has to go next day to someone in some of the city. And it's as simple as that. And you pay the money and you get it, you see it, and next day it has reached. But to deliver this business, deliver this service to millions of people, customers, you need a backbone of infrastructure. And this slide or this picture on the website and you can click on the link below, gives you the backbone of the infrastructure. As I said, the planes will not come house to house, but you will get a delivery at your house. So apart from the big planes, you also have a lot of people riding around in a lot of vans which goes house to house to house. And on any one day, these vans will probably be going to hundreds of million houses or tens of million houses delivering the parcel. That document, that small gift, that medicine or whatever is important. So that's service delivery. But how do we interact with DHL? One is of course to go to the counter. But there cannot be counters in every nook and corner. And therefore, there's an electronic interface. Again, the link is there. So you can go to that website and you can book your courier shipment. It is very similar to let's say, buying on Amazon or Flipkart or booking a movie ticket in Book My Show or a plane ticket in Make My Chip. So again, this is service delivery. The ease of use is very easy to book a service because you can go to this website and book it. And just like in Amazon, you can have a lot of products, options or in a restaurant or in aeroplanes, you can buy many sectors, many kinds of seat. Even in DHL, you've got different kind of services and you can go to the website and click and choose from the menu of services that they're offering. Now we start coming into purchase assist or booking assist. And like many other service providers, they're using chatbots. So if you go to that link, which is there, there is actually a chatbot which will guide you through your shipment procedure. So all of this comes under service delivery, which is what you see. And at the back, which you don't see is this whole network of aeroplanes and vans and people and facilities and aircrafts and airports. Again, this is one more page of where you get help with the pricing and the timing. Because you may want to know the pricing that I want to send a document from India to Africa or Chennai to Guwahati. And you want to know how much will it cost me. And you get to see this here and you say I want to be able to send this shipment at 10 o'clock in the morning tomorrow or 11 o'clock day after and you can schedule it. And then once you've handed over the document or the parcel to DHL, you may want to keep track of it. Just like if you have booked something on an e-commerce site, you want to know when the product will be delivered to you. So when you have using this service, you want to know where is my shipment now and when it will be delivered. And you'll get similar, I'm taking one mini case with DHL but you'll get similar service support from any of the e-commerce sites. Or book my show, make my trip, or OLA or Uber or any of the hotel booking sites, et cetera. And then if you look at it, there are many other options where it makes easy for you to understand what service are you getting. In this case, moving a parcel and gift to somewhere else. And most of the service providers and DHL in this case also give you the example or an option to use it on your mobile. So you have an app. So many of us have many apps on our phones to do electronic business and get electronic service. So DHL also has that. All of this comes under service delivery. And the intent of all of this is to make it easy for you and me as customers to use that service. As a company has a good, easy interface, we become loyal to it. So if we start becoming loyal to DHL, we may not go to other express providers like FedEx or UPS or many others. So it's very important that the service that we experience is high quality and it's not a headache for any of us and you get access to whatever you want. And then if you have a complaint, things do go wrong. Do they have a complaint management procedure? Now, this is a generic picture of a call center. And many times when you have a problem, you would have called up a number and you have said, oh, I've got this problem. It could be a bank. It could be an airline. It could be a phone that is broken down or a refrigerator, TV, washing machine, et cetera. And these are call centers where there are people who are sitting and they're called service agents who listen to you and try to solve your problem. Now, I give you a flavor of what is customer service delivery and how some companies like DHL are delivering good service to you. But how do companies measure their service quality? Remember, quality goes with cost. So companies are always balancing between great service but optimized costs. Because if you get great service, but it costs the company a lot, the company loses money. So the companies have to become very effective but also very efficient in service quality but also manage their costs. So good companies, in fact, all companies will manage both the quality KPIs, quality measures, and the cost measure. Let's look at some of the customer service quality measures. First, number of calls. If your business is growing at 10 percent but the number of calls are growing at 20 percent, there's something wrong. Because the more you sell, the more problems are being created. So there's a problem. So you have to track the number of calls. Once the call comes in, how quickly are you responding? You and I have both experienced when you've called a call center and you go to a voice recording and said, please, all our agents are busy. Please wait for two minutes or three minutes. Or press one for this, two for this, three for this, four for this, and you keep waiting. So how long does it take for you to get to a person and how much wait time is there before an agent picks up the call? And after the agent has picked up the call, is the problem resolved in the first call or do you have to keep calling up and up and up? If it's resolved on the first call, you have been able to get and connect to a customer service agent very quickly, you'll be happy. But in cases delayed, what's the resolution time? Is it on the call? Some problem has been solved? Is it one day, one hour, two days, three hours, or never got solved? So resolution time. Companies also measure repeat calls because if you have to keep calling back and calling back and calling back, chances are you'll be very unhappy and you'll not use that product again. Customer rating, of course. Because everybody takes either NPS feedback, you will get a link most of the times and you will be able to give feedback. It's also online rating. So if you go to an aggregator, like Sugeya and Samartya, you can give feedback and rate the food and the restaurant. Same with Amazon or Flipkart. Failure rates, when things have totally collapsed and what you're supposed to give, either you have not given or have given but it doesn't work. So that's a failure rate. All companies do have failure rates. A flight which is cancelled. It's a failure, complete failure. There's nothing you can do about it. And then penalties and refunds. So a flight has been cancelled so you have to give back the money. So that is a measure. If you're giving back too much money and being paying too much penalty, then that's not good. And the company knows there's something wrong. So these are measures of the service quality. As I said, it's not enough for the company to give great customer service if it costs too high. So companies also keep a track of what is the cost of service. And some of the KPIs or measures that they track are cost per call. So if you spend too much money on per call and the cost per call is going up and going up, which can happen if the calls are too long because it's taking too long to resolve, then the company starts losing money. Total cost, of course. How much does it cost me to service all my customers? Total headcount. So if my business is going at 10%, am I recruiting at 20% headcount increase? Then I lose money. This is becoming more and more expensive to service my customers. Infrastructure. Am I needing more and more buildings or computer systems or bandwidth to service my customer? So people cost, infrastructure costs, and IT costs. All companies will balance between great customer service and optimum costs. So the revenues go up because customers are happy, but you don't start losing money servicing those customers. So that's the balance. Let's look at now at some of the public sector which are also improving their customer service versus let's say 30, 40 years back. And a great example is State Bank of India. So those of you who bank with the State Bank or Punjab National or any of those banks or in fact any of the private sector banks in India as well, they will have a customer addressal policy. It's a must. They have to do it as per RBI norms or the norms laid down by government. And here's an example and you can find it on the website. The link is given below. You can go to the website and you can find what is the customer addressal policy. So there's a whole written down policy on how State Bank has to resolve customer complaints and same with other banks. It's required. That's the addressal policy and again if you go to the link you'll find that they have got the people to whom you can approach and if the bank branch doesn't solve your problem, the branch manager, the branch staff, you'll find that the addresses of the regional manager, the zonal manager, the national manager and ultimately you can go to the embassement. And all of this is on the website. If you walk into a branch of SBI or any of the banks you'll find if you look around there's a notice or a poster of what the addressal policy is. And that gives you the comfort that I can bank with this bank without any headaches. So you're happy with the service that you get. Government departments, the great thing is that the government has launched an initiative for good governance including responsiveness across government departments. And if you go to the website which is given, which is given below, you can go and see how government departments, ministries, etc. are now becoming responsive to the common India people. So Indians, Indian citizens get good service and therefore are happy with government departments. And again if you go there you'll find that both are given. You can see the results and the KPIs of how public grievance is being resolved by the government and government departments. And all of this actually leads to happier citizens because they're getting good service from the government. So I've tried to talk to you about customer service in many different aspects. First, what is service? How do you build great loyalty? How do you look at the cost of service? Private sector companies but also government of India who is all leading to happier customers and happier citizens. So with that I'd like you to now reflect and write down in a course journal what you have heard so far but also think about products and services that you use and if you drop a list of products and services biscuits, soaps, shampoos detergents, airlines restaurants, cinema halls or clinics think about how many of them do you use how many will you promote because you're so happy and how many of you will say oh they're terrible please don't use those and how many of them are you neutral about it's okay you don't care about it you'll not talk good and you'll not talk bad so drop that list and as you think about it you will start understanding and internalizing what is good customer service and what builds customer loyalty and try to identify differences between restaurants between e-commerce sites between let's say Ola and Uber between Oyo and Airbnb or two balls or two neighborhood stores or two hospitals and clinics and try and think what's the difference between a good service provider and a bad service provider or a good product and a bad product let's say you buy an LG or a Samsung TV or a refrigerator or a Goodrich and a Whirlpool, AC some product or a Samsung versus one plus smartphone think about not just the product but the value proposition the pricing and the service which you got when you bought the product, before you bought the product if you had a problem and try and understand what the differences are and as you do that and you write down you will start understanding what is customer service, customer loyalty how to grade customer service and not so good customer service so please reflect let's not talk about customer service skills that you need if you wish to choose a career in customer service and customer service itself is a huge function because most companies need customer service in some way or the other banks, hospitals, airlines aggregators e-commerce as well as mall operators Star Bazaar, DMART etc there is huge amount of call centers which are service and customer so it can be a very rewarding career with lots of job opportunities so what are the skills that you need remember in customer service you are always dealing with people and sometimes you are dealing with angry people because there has been a failure in service so not always you have to deal with happy people so first of all what you need is patience you have to be patient to hear out the customer and understand the problem you have to be empathetic with that person for example if you are working in the customer service department of an airline and a passenger has called you because the flight is delayed you have to be empathetic and understand that that passenger probably had a very important event wherever he was going to and because the flight is late his personal life will get disrupted so you have to have an empathy for the customer to understand the customer is also like a human being like yourself and he is buying your product or service because he has a need and if he doesn't get good service he becomes sad and angry and dissatisfied so you have to deal with that customer with patience and empathy then once you have understood the problem you have to listen actively and ask the question sir madam what is the problem what did you do, what did you not do did you try this, did you not try this you have to do active listening and then you have to have persuasive communication and tell him sir, madam, we will solve it for you don't worry we regret the inconvenience let me help you then you have to build the trust and the relationship because if you don't do that the customer will be angry frustrated, dissatisfied and the customer will never come back and if everybody does this kind of bad customer service will slowly decline but on the other hand if all the customer services are absolutely great problems are solved is good to talk to that company's customer service agent think about it, you will be happy if you are a customer and you will keep going back and you will tell others and the final thing you need to know is you need to know your own company you need to know your own company products and services because if you don't know that your own company's product and services you will not be able to answer questions you will not be able to persuade people you will not be able to solve the problems and the customer has to calling you back and calling you back customer is unhappy, your time is wasted customer's time is wasted the cost of the company goes up and everything is unsatisfactory so if you want to choose a career in customer service please develop these human skills as well as the product and the service knowledge which are more hard skills and hard knowledge so with that we come to the end of this module namaskar, thank you