#4 Building Trust — Flipkart on Customers
P.S: We are in future and living in Flipkart City. Flipkart built a city — a city where we depend on Flipkart for our everyday needs. How Flipkart build this city? How did they do create such a loyal customer base aka citizens like us? Read the previous entries in this blog to read about Flipkart City history.
One should do business, the way it is supposed to be — Build Trust.
Flipkart took a decade to build our trust. The trust because of which the city is now called — Flipkart City. Lets discuss the factors which led Flipkart to built our city.
Shown Trust In Customers —
Flipkart trusted us more than anyone. Used all the possible channels to promote this “Enlightenment” message to all of us. Rather than spending money on fancy advertisements, they believed in sending message to us by different means — TV Ads, Pamphlets etc
A world class customer service which is of the people, by the people and for the people.
Joke ends here. Really? How many of you are actually thinking that this trick worked. It only works in country politics — where these politicians makes false promises without any plan of execution.
Until you improve your services, nobody is going to believe you.
Promises doesn’t count, until you work towards it.
They started baby steps to improve Flipkart service day to day. It took them years to execute these baby steps properly.
Step 1 — Correct Categorization of Products —
If you look closely, below classification covers all the products :
For all the products without warranty, they provided us the very easy return policies and for products with warranty they provided us the door to door service of the product. No more hassle of connecting with manufacturer to repair product.
No complex rules for us to understand —
- 30 day replacement replacement depending on the products.
- Flipkart Warranty Services — Door to Door Service for years
- No returns / replacement for few products
Now every product on Flipkart carries a symbol which is easy for us to understand.
These symbols on every product, helped us to do faster checkout without any doubt in mind.
This strategy not only helped in faster checkout but also reduced the number of cancellation and customer care calls because of lack of readability of product return policies.
Now we can transact with Flipkart very easily, as while buying large appliances after sales service is always a concern but after this step load was shared by Flipkart.
Large Appliances / Electronics:
Flipkart now picks up the appliances at our door steps. Because of its excellent delivery network they delivery it to authorized service center on time. Provide us with contact details of the service center to followup on the progress. Once the appliance is fixed, Flipkart brings product back to us. Though we can easily guess that the delivery charges are the part of our warranty fee but we don’t mind paying a little extra for this convenience. We didn’t even question Flipkart for extra fee on the same.
The only problem with this inclusion of service for Flipkart would be — sometimes we return products after bad service. In that case Flipkart has to do multiple round of deliveries. From my internal sources I came to know that, Flipkart charges service center for extra deliveries because of bad service quality.
In all cases every service center has to declare the list of task that needs to be done to fix the product. We are asked to agree to the fixes before the service begins. We can also add things to be fixed in that list. If all the task has been complete, the product is ready to be shipped back to us.
After this world class after sales service by Flipkart, the only decision that we have to take is to decide which product to buy without worrying about anything else.
Easy Product Return
Returns are painful for both us and Flipkart. Returns kills the excitement of owning the product and for Flipkart return logistics is very costly. In early days 25–30% products were getting return but now as per the data published this year — Flipkart has just 1% return. How it happened?
Flipkart collected data from us related to reason of return. They massaged data of last 10 years and figured out that most of the returns are because of cheap quality products listed on Flipkart. Rest of the returns are something they can’t avoid — it constitutes only 5% of the returns.
The first step taken by Flipkart was having high quality check but truly however strong quality checks you have, it never works. You will always have a lot of issues.
Flipkart hits the bulls eye again — They start trusting their “Sellers” .
Flipkart started to think out of the box. Where all the competition were hiding the sellers details and their business in front-line. Flipkart started to push sellers business in front-line. Now sellers are in pressure to build their own brand name on Flipkart just like YouTubers are building brand name on Youtube.
Putting seller in front-line was bold step but the confidence of vast delivery network and delivering products conveniently than anyone helped Flipkart to take this bold decision. Remember
No seller can match Flipkart Customer Service Satisfaction.
Flipkart is now become a platform to do business — Create your own brand on Flipkart !
Now sellers themselves take care of the product quality to avoid any bad comments from us. To make it easy, they allowed us to see complete stats of the sellers. It is not just a plain dashboard with reviews and comments but rather an extensive list of interaction with different customers. Only verified purchasers are allowed to rate seller.
Overtime Flipkart builds Machine Learning Capabilities to suggest us the best matching sellers based all customer interaction like delivery satisfaction, return count, product quality etc. Now we can see which seller suits us the best while buying any product. With this data, we are now taking informed decision — price is not the only factor but our overall experience with the seller is also considered. It helped to reduce returns count.
I would discuss more about how Flipkart thought process evolution on building a platform rather than creating another online commerce in my next blog entry.
There are many baby steps they have taken to improve our relationship with Flipkart. Stay Tuned !
