Well a lot of has changed about customer service since new age media came into picture. Customers can actually impact potential customers choice just by googling. I just experienced an incident where i was called back for my tweet. Let me explain in detail.
There is one awesome mobile app ngpay which is simply too good and gives you a direct access to bank literally in addition to lot of other key m-commerce options. I have been using this app for more than a year and have always been impressed with how they provide value on your finger tips. But last saturday i was slightly let down by it and i was more pissed off by their social media team.
I was on dire need of cash for personal emergency on last saturday and bank being holiday for bakrid, the only option was just to take out of ATM. I exhausted my 10k limit on other bank ATM(Our town had only one ATM functional at that moment) and was thinking how i can get as much as i can. That was the time to check out HDFC Fund transfer on ngpay. I tried to transfer 10 k to another HDFC account and it failed. Then i did a 5k, it succeeded. When i called up HDFC customer care why it was not allowing and whether it was problem at HDFC or ngpay, i was told HDFC allows till 10k, So i called up ngpay customer care to get a clarification why i was not allowed to transact when i have funds and HDFC says the limit is 10k per day. The call was not attended for ~5 long minutes and i got pissed off. To vent out my frustration i wrote this tweet. Left it then and made ways to get money.
Monday morning rush hour to office i get a call from ngpay asking what was my issue. I explained the problem i faced and got a clarification saying RBI limits fund transfers to 5k per day and merchant transactions can be up to 10k per day. Fair enough, HDFC is not aware of this, ngpay being in core m-commerce domain may be best persons on RBI’s m-commerce policy. I thanked him and left to my office. Again after an hour i got a call from another person asking if am satisfied with response to my query. Obviously the person wasnt happy with my tweet and was insisting that i update it. I was also told about other mechanisms of contacting like customer support like emailing , using the “Contact” option in the application etc indirectly to imply that ‘I need not tweet if i dont get support, there are other ways of getting it too’ .Once again i was reminded that “it would be great if i updated my twitter status”. Probably what they expected was a tweet like “ngpay customer care rocks! they promptly called me seeing my tweet”, but i wrote this “Okay.@ngpay seems to have ‘rot learned’ customer service through social media.I will write more on it soon.at least tweets get some response”.
Let me explain that tweet. While i completely appreciate ngpay for embracing new media like twitter and responding to customers, I find very few Indian companies actually learn the art of customer service and making the customer more comfortable using these new media.ngpay too has areas to improve along with others like tatadocomo,redbus_in many others.
I might be wrong in all fronts, but am just writing my thoughts below. The brands which adopt new media use them to do a better brand management. So they have to learn that there will always be detractors for the brand as well as attractors. So when they get the free branding from customers who are satisfied, they should understand that they will also get detractors automatically when the customers are dissatisfied. So instead of asking the ‘dissatisfied’ customer to change their views and propagate them, they must provide more value to get the positive sentiment back on new media possibly from the same person and others.
What ngpay did wrongly?
1. While they saw my tweet and called back, am damn sure their process hasnt changed you may still get call waiting for 5 minutes and may not be called back until you tweet something like i did. They didnt take my critical feedback in complete sense and act on it, they just asked if my query was resolved. It is critical that you improve your voice support since its all related to money. I will not be transacting if i know that your customer support is pita and i may not get attended after a possible failed transaction worth 10k.
2. The person who spoke second time, actually did more damage (So much that it has given me energy to write such a long post when my blog is nearing death). The person spoke about contacting through email, Contact us instead of tweeting a critical feedback.Now among call centre,email,contact us, twitter, only call centre and twitter are real-time communication tools. If i had ability to email [access to computer], i would never used ngpay firstly, have used net banking and everything would have been peaceful. “Contact us”(basically will again email you) is again a passive option and am not sure to get a response soon. I thought twitter was a real-time tool, perhaps i should have realised your twitter account is just there for sake of it when i tweeted nice things about ngpay and found you retweeted after days. So lesson is if you are on twitter, make sure you check the account twice a day(at least) and not only monitor it on 9 – 5 during weekdays. I would also suggest you to read this article to get a sense of why i called customer care and then tweeted instead of emailing.
Related read :- Cleartrip-Kiruba Incident
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