Blue Dart Initiates Customer Satisfaction Benchmark

News Clip : eFinancial Express, Bangalore

March, 2003.

Source : Tarun Narayan, Mumbai.

Picture this: As a business entity you have dispatched an important package that contains some confidential business documents. You are vexed not knowing the status of the documents shipped. You end up making endless calls to the courier service office asking them when the 'Proof of Delivery' (POD) will come your way since you need to be assured that everything that was sent has reached the destination. Now, Blue Dart Express Ltd promises to cure you of these conventional woes.

Termed 'net service levels', the initiative is all internal benchmarking exercise by which the organisation evolves an action plan to examine the areas where the customer satisfaction levels have not matched up to the standards that have been established internally by the enterprise. The company also evolves marketing strategics that can enable its business to effectively retain customers.

Says Blue Dart Express Ltd senior vice-president (marketing & projects) Tulsi Mirchandaney: "The express service Industry does not have any external benchmark to look up to. We, therefore, decided to look into some of the operations that we have successfully institutionalised internally, and use those as benchmark to efficiently address various customer needs."

This implies that every day professionals from Blue Dart will monitor the exact status of various shipments of its clients, specially air cargo services which is one of the core offerings where the company generates substantial business volumes. In this business, the company may encounter imperatives like flight delays to bad weather conditions or some other peculiar circumstances which may lead to considerable worry and anxiety for the target customers. This is more so because the delivery of these shipments would be crucial to effectively run their own independent end-businesses. The team within the company, in such instances will track the specific geographical areas where the. problem persists through Internal technology tool and other aligned systems that have been initiated by the enterprise. The company will also personally interact with customers and explain to them the exact reasons for the delay along with the time when the cargo Will be delivered.

The company has also constituted key accounts teams which comprise professionals who are from diverse business functions. This would include professionals from IT and marketing to name a few.

Further, the moment the company discovers that there are certain areas where customer service delivery is not in sync with the standards that have been set by the organisation, the entire team gets down to analysing the problem. This is done to determine where exactly the company needs to gear up further.