Route to growth

I will get to the point eventually.

The router in my home office was having problems; it wasn't able to hold an Internet connection. So I went to call customer service. It turned out that the router was made by a United States company, so I had to call a number in the US, which got transferred to a call centre in India. I spent over six hours talking to the technicians [paying all the time for a long distance call to the US], but they were unable to solve the problem. I was instructed to call customer service.

Customer service was also in the US, but their hours were only midnight to 8am, Asia time. So not only did I have to pay for the long distance call, I had to stay awake until midnight for the pleasure of doing so. Customer service said that although I purchased the router here in Asia, I had to box it up and mail it to the US, wait a month for them to repair it, and pay for them to send it back to me.

No thank you, no thank you, no thank you! I went right out and bought a new router, serviced by a company in Asia, with Asian phone numbers and a service centre right here in the town where I live.

What's my point? Often in business, we concentrate all our energies on winning a new customer, but we forget that long-term business is built on repeat customers. The way to create customer loyalty is by giving terrific service and product support, after the purchase. To put that another way: it is relatively easy to win a client, but keeping a client, sometimes for years, is often much harder.

I am not attacking US companies here. Every company has the right to put their service centre and customer-support operation in a location of their choosing. But when a company decides to market its products in Asia, it must understand the needs of its Asian customers and build a support programme to service those needs.

Readers of The Nation represent Thai, Asian, and multi-national companies. I would pose these questions to you:

1. How much time, effort and care do you give to servicing current customers, as opposed to winning new ones?

2. How much do you know about your customers' needs? What are they complaining about?

3. Have you built a strong after-care service model?

Previously, I have written about the business of politics and the politics of business. There are many parallels between the two. Politicians make campaign promises as they try to get votes, and that is the same as a company trying to win new customers by making marketing offers. Just as companies have to service clients after the purchase, so do political parties have to live up to their campaign promises. If a party can deliver on its promises, it will usually have satisfied voters who will re-elect them; if a party fails to deliver, it runs into trouble. President Obama has struggled to deliver on his promised "Hope and Change", so his chances for re-election are looking dim. Perhaps we can think the same about the political promises made recently in Thailand.

Whether you are a politician, or like most of us, a businessman, understanding customers' needs, solving those needs, and then continuing to listen to your customers is the only way to build a business.

Eric Rosenkranz helps both existing and start-up companies to develop long-term strategies and achieve success. Follow his "Creating Success" series in Hi! Managers on every fourth Friday of the month.