Consumers expect trust, accountability and responsibility from a brand: Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl

The recently held India Brand Conclave 2021, powered by e4m, witnessed marketing luminaries gather and discuss the best way to build and grow brands, especially in today’s digital landscape. In his session, Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl, Chief Operating Officer, BharatPe, gave a succinct breakdown of 'Better Customer Experience: A Game Changer For Companies' wherein he discussed creating a brand identity that companies along with people who used their goods and services, would be proud to associate with, while also curating the kind of customer service that would be superlative and stand out from the crowd.

He said, “These have been very uncertain times, and there have been a lot of changes across the board. During these challenging times, we definitely want to build on the excellence of consumer experiences that transcend its transactional nature and build a brand identity that people can associate with. In financial services, that is especially relevant.” Elucidating on the same, Bahl added that what consumers expect from a brand is trust, accountability and responsibility, and excellence in goods and or services provided.

Noting that while it’s only a three-year-old company, BharatPe is set to offer the entire spectrum of financial services, so much so that Mr Bahl enthused, “Someone recently told us ‘you guys are like the SpaceX of financial services, you do everything.’ And that is probably the best compliment we’ve gotten so far. So we’re doing a lot, but at the core of it all, is our customer. Our customers are of two types: one is the merchant which is an established business, which is what BharatPe is; the second is the consumer, interested in the newer features we’re launching.”

However, he says it’s important to treat both as the customer, bringing together MX (Merchant Experience) and CX (Consumer Experience) so as to be able to offer the same level of personalisation and care.

Elaborating on how one of the metrics of measuring CX is NPS (Net Promoter Score) which measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others, essentially word of mouth marketing, Mr Bahl said those who say they’ve had an average customer experience, will also be unwilling to recommend the company and in fact, speak negatively of it to others. Hence, the need is for companies to always ensure customers have an excellent (a ‘wow’ rating, so to speak) experience across all metrics.

To illuminate this point, he shared a small story. Ruing that the insurance industry is one of those least likely to make customers say they’ve had a ‘wow’ experience, given that they’re paying upfront for a product they will probably never consume and only be able to use if the worst happens and even then payments can be held up for minutiae of reasons. Bahl then pointed out that insurance giant Allianz boasts one of the highest NPSs in the world.

“Allianz was so confused by what they were doing right, that it hired a management consultancy to get to the bottom of it, and after running a thorough investigation across all aspects of the company, they found there was one particular employee, in one call center, who was outperforming everyone else,” he recounted, adding that this is when the NSP of Allianz still hadn’t reached the level it now enjoys.

It turns out that this employee, working at a German call center of the company in the auto claims, would answer every call by first checking up on the customer, whether they and or their family was fine and if they needed any kind of assistance, spending the first 5-10 minutes of the call ascertaining the client’s physical, mental and emotional health. He summed up saying, “And that’s all it was. So they decided that this is a practice that will be adopted by all their call centers across the world, and even today, if you have to call up Allianz for any kind of claim, the first thing they’ll do is enquire after your health and well-being and they are ranked as having one of the best customer services in the world”.

Underlining the fact that effective customer service needs to first and foremost be customer service, Mr Bahl concluded that companies have found that their relationships cannot only be transactional as there is a high degree of EQ that is layered on top of the B2C model that they deploy. And that is true across every brand, whether ground-based or digital and something every company needs to ensure to provide the best-possible CX and so build their brand further.