Are You Listening, Sir?

I recently read three seemingly unrelated articles in one of the business journals. What intrigued me was that despite no correlation between them per se, there appeared to be a common theme—an inherent message of how we wish to conduct our business.

The first article was about a global FMCG company with an emerging food business in India. The company had announced the launch of its new offerings for Indian breakfast, stating that in its interactions with customers across sections and geographies within India, it sensed an unarticulated and unmet demand for more healthy, ready-made breakfast options. So far, it has been confined to cereals with various forms of flakes, be it corn or wheat. So, the company customized these western offerings to suit the customary Indian light breakfast requirements, making them wholesome and yet not compromising on the flavor.

The second article was about another leading FMCG and food company. Upon being questioned about its fast declining market share, the negligible success of most of its recent offerings, and the need to change its strategy to get first-hand responses from customers, the company said that it will continue to follow the management policy and practices they have followed globally and in India for a few decades.

The third article was about a near-announcement by a government department about its almost final decision to not allow any withdrawals from the provident fund by employee beneficiaries before retirement. There was also the possibility of discontinuing the current practice of partial withdrawal/loans from the provident fund for specified exigencies. To the credit of another government department with authority on the subject, the need to continue with the practice of allowing withdrawals was pointed out, especially in view of the lack of any social security along the lines of the American 401(k) plans or public health plans. Up until the time of writing this piece, the debate is still on.

While it is utopian and naïve for one to expect a government department to treat employee beneficiaries of the provident fund scheme as its customers, an important point must be considered: Where is the consultation process with the stakeholders who are going to bear the direct impact of this measure? If not as a customer, doesn’t anyone care about his voice as a stakeholder whose money is the subject of the policy here and on whose behalf the decision is being made?

The other two articles I had read reflect contrasting examples of reaching out to current and potential customers. They spoke about probing into the customer’s stated and unstated needs and attempting to design solutions based on identified needs while continuing to take feedback from various classes of the masses. At the same time, they also pointed to self-fulfilling, audacious prophecies of “knowing” the requirements of the “defined” customers and acting upon a kind of self-knowledge of what suits the customers. It was a rather curious and interesting contrast.

While there’s no denying the fact that one cannot be everything to everyone, have we done enough to know which segment we wish to cater to? Why have we chosen this segment as our target market? What do we wish to offer this chosen segment and, most importantly, does the range of our offerings reflect our views of the needs of the segment or the views of the segment itself?

Ultimately, the basic question is this: Is one listening enough to one’s customers?

The views expressed here are personal.

Tags:
Bharat Banka, customers