Customer Service-MNC Vs. Local Companies

Most people carry the perception that the customer service of MNC Companies is better than that of a local Company. This is due to the belief that the MNC's bring their global processes and their customer focus to their operations worldwide.

I had a recent experience that proved the contrary. I wrote a mail to three companies on the same day, one MNC (Unilever) and two Local Companies(J.K. Helene Curtis of the Raymonds Group and Tata Croma Retail) for customer issues with products that I was using of these companies.

From Unilever, I immediately received a automated response from the System Administrator. The content of the mail was as under.

"Dear Sender,

Thank you for contacting Levercare.

Please do not respond to this mail, as it was automatically generated.

Best Wishes - System Administration"

No promise of looking into the matter. No promise of reverting in a particular period and till date they have not responded.

From J. K. Helene Curtis, I received a mail after two days, but despite my not seeking a replacement of the product, they insisted on the replacement and did it. The Consumer Care Team got in touch with their local representative, gave my phone number and contact details to the local representative and replaced the product.

From Tata Croma Retail, I got a automated mail immediately on registering my complaint on their website and a call within one hour from the Local office. They apologised for the problems that I faced and resolved the same immediately. Since this complaint was related to a purchase that I did not make, the representative called me again after a few days and asked me whether I had purchased the product. She had analysed the customer invoices to check for my Invoice and not finding it had called me. I had purchased the product from another Croma store in the same city and told her so. After this the issue was closed from their side and I received a email closing the issue.

I do not mean to generalise for or against MNC and Local Companies. In fact, I have used the customer service of Dell and HP in the past and vouch that the kind of support they provide is unbeatable. My Dell Laptop Warranty comes with a SLA of 24 hours onsite and I have found that their processes ensure that the support reaches me in 24 hours.

The learning from this is that the local companies are improving their processes and customer care and that MNC always does not always mean better customer care.

If the Local Companies continue this way in customer focus, quality, research and development they will not have anything to fear from the larger companies.

After this experience, my loyalty to Croma Retail and J. K. Helene Curtis is definitely higher than my loyalty to Unilever India.

As stated in the last post, I will endeavor to present the contra view with facts, data or anecdotes to help you make an informed decision.