customer experience in malaysia
Though the concept of customer experience has been around for a long time since the civilization, the term itself may be new, specifically in countries like Malaysia. Now what is customer experience. There are many variants to this term but it simply means how an organization which has customers (could also include non profit org and government agencies) manage the customer's interaction with that organization at every point that the organization touches the customer! It is an effort taken by companies to enhance the experience of their existing and potential clients in its hope that they will continue to be their customer.
So is customer experience key to important for business sustainability or growth? Absolutely! What is a business when there is no customer? And how can a business continue to grow when the customer's experience is not managed adequately? Many organizations are already managing these experience in one way or another so that their customer remain happy and continue to buy from them. They may not explicitly call it a customer experience or have a person or a department to manage this. It is sometime built it within the core business and that is far more superior than having a large customer experience department which is not part of the business but remain outside the core strategy.
What is required in a business? Of course customers. But what type of customers are needed? To grow, a business need profitable AND happy customers. One cannot have a profitable but un-happy customer or happy but not profitable customer. In the former care, the customer may be spending the money on the company, but not for long. In the latter, the company may be over investing on customers that don't buy from them. Example are plenty and one that comes to mind immediate are the free loaders "customers" who ride on a company's expenses from beer, food, golf, karaoke and list goes on. Of course the onus is on the company to identify such "customers" and stop draining out more.
Lets look at the profitable but the un-happy customers because this is very common in Malaysia. One may ask why a customer continue to buy the product or services when they are not happy - quick answer is that they don't have a choice! Some examples are Tenaga national -TNB (national power supply), Syabas (water provider), Toll concessionaires (PLUS, NPE, LDP etc), satellite TV provider and a host of government agencies. How are they going to be competitive in the future? Why do they need to? Customers will continue come pouring and you can give the lousiest service and they will continue pouring in, some call this a captive market. But for how long, one year, 10 years or 20 years? Eventually the market force will drive them to open up and introduce new players which then put them into a sudden wake up call from a deep sleep.
One good example is MAS, our national airlines. It was resting on its laurel until a cheap and no frills airlines landed. Now and because they have been in deep sleep for a long time, getting out of it could be a challenge. One of the most difficult thing to change in an organization is its culture, the way they work, attitude etc. MAS will need to take double the effort to transform, no no..thats a big word, to change from where they are now to where they desire to be. Its not impossible, it can be done, but it needs the higher managements real effort to kick the status-quo.
