Your Brand's Worth?

A funny conversation with a friend today led to the realisation that I have fought/argued with several companies/brands due to bad service delivered. I could recall ten of those, and here they are!

Airtel

Vodafone

HUL - Pureit

Spicejet

HSBC

Barista

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf

Pizza Hut

Adidas

Hair & Shanti/Madonna/Meghna - all are hair salons in Delhi

The first five were pretty severe wars.

The food/beverage places tend to mess it up a lot more anyway!

Adidas, well, once each shoe of a pair broke into two within a few months of purchase and they offered no help whatsoever!

And the rest for giving me bad haircuts on several occasions. :-|

On the other hand, some brands that have been great experiences in terms of quality of product as well as service are...

Dell

Converse

Costa Coffee

Samsung

Gati

Marks & Spencer

DTDC

Bata Power

Timex

And some doctors that I have been visiting for a long time now. :P

Tell me how often do you fight for the exorbitant service taxes and mad MRPs you pay?

Do It Right!

This post is here because Gati, the express cargo delivery company has left me highly impressed with its services. I was a little apprehensive, but still sent home most of my belongings via Gati because lugging it all even on train would not have been a good idea.

Because of a group deal, they came to our away-from-civilisation hill to pick up the stuff, handled everything professionally, and promised a speedy delivery. While all that was a basic minimum that you expect from a service provider like that, what impressed me was the way in which they kept me informed about the movement of my stuff. Every few hours I received an sms from them telling me how the luggage has moved from one part of Pune to another, to how it has departed from Pune, and when it arrived in Delhi, and finally about the final delivery. The time mentioned in each sms was to the second. And when I tracked it on their website, I noticed that the sms was sent within 10 minutes of the luggage reaching a particular destination. The whole experience has actually left me in awe of them! And quite an economical deal, may I add. Testimony to that is a classmate's status message that reads - "103 kgs for for only Rs 1466, quite happy I say! :-)"

Very impressive!

Dell rocks!

I bought a Dell laptop last summer. It is still under its 1-year warranty. But this warranty is limited to basic issues, and not for any damage done to the hardware. You need to pay extra at the time of purchase for that cover. I never felt the need for it, and so did not buy it. But like I mentioned here before, I'd broken a key off the keypad, and I did need assistance for it.
When I first wrote to them, they told what the process is, and the best they could do is send me a quotation for replacement of the keypad. I insisted for the repair under my existing warranty. Insisting here means writing back: "I expect this repair to be made under the warranty provided to me. Because if you are telling me that Dell products are this useless, I think it puts serious questions on the quality you people deliver". They wrote back saying that I should expect a call from their logistics team soon for fixing up of a convenient time for the engineer to visit and replace my keypad. 24 hours, and I have a new keypad. Moi is happy. Very very happy. For the first time I saw customer relationship management the way Kotler and the others talk of it.
I know I was a little unreasonable in this case. But they did not even put forth an argument. They just obliged. I love them. I really do. I could marry Dell if it were a man.