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Kallol Das
CRM Consultant, Professor of Management & Author

The Smart Company
“We are going through a very bad phase with sales and profits falling sharply. We attribute our poor business performance to overall recession in the market,” says Mr. CEO of a Traditional Company.
“What is recession? We are continuously increasing our sales and profits year after year,” says Mr. Leader of a Smart Company belonging to the same industry.
Strange, isn’t it? Two companies giving two very conflicting opinions about the business climate.
You will meet the first kind of companies quite often. The second kind of companies — the smart companies — is a minority community. They are the jewels in the corporate world. They are very successful and will always remain successful.
The Traditional Company works for immediate profits. They have a short-term approach to business. Someone has nicely said, “Working for profits is like playing tennis with your eyes on the scoreboard.” They look at customers as a by-product of the business. They may be doing very well. But their success is short lived.
Let us take the example of Fortune 500 companies. These are the largest and most profitable corporations of the world. But if you consider them to be invincible, then think again. According to a research study, only 3 of the Fortune 500 companies from year 1900 still exist, without merger or acquisition.
The Smart Company works for customers. They have a long-term approach to business. Customer retention is the purpose of their business. Profit is just the by-product. And my God! They make huge amount of by-products.
John Stubbs, CEO of the UK-based The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), spoke to one Indian business magazine: “We started five years ago by sponsoring research through the London Business School to establish the relationship between customer focus and business success. From a statistical base of 5,000 companies, where we wrote to the Chief Executives and analysed the responses from around 500 companies, we were able to establish that the greatest correlation is between companies that cared for their customers and also gave highest returns to their shareholders.”
McDonald’s is an example of a smart company. It has Indianised many offerings to suit local needs. It came out with Mr. Shahkahari Treat that included Chatpatey Potato Wedges, McAloo Tikkas, McVeggies, etc.
Patricia Seybold, renowned Customer Guru in her seminar at Mumbai had this to say: “Until we redesign our entire business to be customer-driven, we won’t be able to meet the needs of the 21st century customers.”

Now, the big question: How do you retain customers for life?
Simply by building lifelong relationships with them. What does that mean?
Well, let us understand what relationship really means. First, it is just not knowing each other or liking each other. It goes beyond. It is all about loving and trusting each other. A strong relationship will create a bond that no outside attraction can break.
In business context, building lifelong relationship between the supplier and the customer means creating a strong bond - a strong bond of love and trust that cannot be broken by any competitor; a strong bond that grows stronger everyday. Simple words but how often do we see them happening?
Scott Bedbury, global brand consultant and former head of marketing at Nike and Starbucks, says, “Companies have been disrespecting people’s intelligence, with product claims they don’t back up, horrible customer service… People are saying, why trust corporations that don’t respect us anyway?”
Consider LG India. It advertises “wrinkle free eyes” promising lower eye strain from watching its TVs, but apparently uses the same picture tube as its rivals. All the airlines treat economy class travellers shabbily. And the service quality of most of the ISPs remains pathetic.
Now, if you are the supplier, you cannot build lifelong relationship with your customer just like that. You need the active involvement of your employees. In other words, you need to build lifelong relationships with your employees towards building lifelong relationships with your customers.
Ashank Desai, chairman, Mastek, one of the top IT companies of India, says, “We encourage warm, friendly, honest and co-operative relationships among the employees. Only when the relationships within the company are warm and friendly would we be able to extend the same to our customers.”

Understanding Business
Before trying to understand business, let us understand customers. We overlook our customer because we don’t have a clear definition of this creature.
We all know Mahatma Gandhi as the Father of our Nation. However, very few know him to be the Father of Customer Care. Gandhiji came out with a revealing description of customer. (See Box “Mahatma Gandhi’s Definition of Customer”)