The Curious case of Airtel and Amazon..
Airtel and Amazon, both of these companies have experienced tremendous growth. Both of them are biggest in their own home-ground and also entered other markets, both of them doing well in other markets as well.
Jeff Bezos and Sunil Bharti Mittal, both have shown tremendous vision in identifying an opportunity early and nailing it to perfection. It was the vision, guile and thought process of both the co-founders, leading both of them to such great heights of success.
Huge customer base, strong market domination, positive revenue and a lot more similarities than we can think of. Both businesses can be a beautiful case study for many start ups. Yet both of them have one very prominent and striking difference from each other. That is the way they treat their acquired customers.
In customer service, both of these organisations stand on extreme end and also on opposite side of the spectrum.If Amazon is the best example ,Airtle might be the exact opposite of it.
Although it is quite notable that bounce off from an e-commerce sight is much quick and easier than a network provider, so the e-commerce company always have to be on it toes to manage customers. If this point is taken into account then the achievement becomes more mammoth given the kind of brand loyalty and user base Amazon has managed to create and maintain over the years.
Whereas in case of Airtel, bounce off maybe difficult but once it happens it becomes literally impossible to re-acquire that customer in short time.
Both the companies put huge emphasis on customer acquisition, maybe one of the most important growth matrix for them but one of them do not pay much emphasis to customer satisfaction or happiness, and it is not difficult to guess the name.
Acquiring customers is the name of the game but when you are at top then there can be two reasons for it. Firstly, people use it because they love to use it and secondly they have to use it for absence of a better alternative. While the first habit keeps you on top, the second one just makes you hang there unless anyone else plays the game better.
The customer service in Airtel needs no introduction, there is maybe less people out there who haven’t experienced it than the number of tigers alive today. You call, you repeat and you frustrate. That’s the mantra. You talk to several people and keep repeating the same problem over and over and then there is unending holds and conversations.
Whereas when you have a problem with Amazon, they go one step ahead to solve that. Their customer success or happiness stories are quickly becoming part of folklore which people love to share.
It is agonising to see Airtel moving in that direction, once a network people would vouch for to now an option. So much to loose even with huge infrastructure and revenue can be straight away related to top down approach towards lack of customer apathy. Whereas , Amazon after so much competition, market share and user base still know to rule the game by putting customer first approach .
With so much market dominance, one organisation claims as “most consumer centric company” and remains that way and the other claims as “most transparent network” but maybe not so much.
Identical and yet so different from each other..