Consumer Exp 1

All of us have different roles to play. We play some with total finesse and some with plain dumbness. We tend to choose our stand according to the favorability of the situation. This time I choose to be a customer and see things from a buyer’s perspective.

I am very BIG on processes. Companies can function optimally only with effective and efficient processes in place. World class services achieved by most of the companies might not be due to their investors or their top brass or their brand name. I want to believe it’s only their attention to details which gives them the edge.

I recently had some instances all in a span of just 2 months which made me realize the power of a customer executive too. All these instances were in the thick of recession. Training your customer executives can save you lots of customers and trouble too.

1. I got a call from one customer executive claiming herself to be from some insurance company. Considering the current shallowness of my pockets I assured her that I might not be in a position to buy anything from her, with a total disregard to her proposal. The lady didn’t persist. she moved on to her new customer without wasting a minute. It was then that the penny dropped. If the lady had persisted a little bit more then she might have extracted enough dough from me to have achieved her target for the day.

Einstein had come up with the theory of relativity. To put it in simple words when one has to sit for a 1.5 hr lecture & listen to your professor droning the agony seems to be endless. On the other hand when you sit with a beautiful lady in a café time flies by like a blink of an eye. Money is also a relative concept.

I had mentioned to the lady that I was unemployed. But does unemployment mean that you do not have bank balances or you do not need insurance. All of us believe in protecting ourselves and our loved ones at all times because Insurance is recession proof. Rs. 2000 might be a pittance for a millionaire but it might be a good investment for a lower class bloke. For an upper middle class fellow Rs. 2000 might be one day’s impulse shopping and might be a local pass fee or a taxi fare the next day. The same holds true for Rs. 10000 too which might have been her insurance target. But does a mere cell number give away my social status or my bank balance?

Now assuming there are at least 5 callers for the insurance company and they call around 100 people of which 30 are unemployed in a day. Even if they convert 1 caller out of this 30 unemployed that makes 5 customers a day and 5*260(days) customers in a year. That’s a whooping Rs. 1.3 Cr from the unemployed to miss out on assuming each one pays Rs.10000 a year as premium. Are the insurance companies hearing?

( To be contd..)