I’ve just spent a few (grim) days at the National Retail Federation’s conference in New York – the NRF Annual Big Show. (After all that grimness, I hope you’ll pardon my play on words in the title!)

However, the key message from several conversations is that this is an ideal time for the better companies to use this opportunity to take tough decisions, and to create change that is hard to push when the business is doing well.

I think that is sound advice to not just get through these recessionary times, but also to pull far ahead of the competition.

At the outset let me mention the fact that in the title of this post lies a Freudian slip. The intended title was “Corporate Responsibility – Beyond Labels”. But the new – unintended – title captures the thought perfectly. (And I’ll come back to that in closing.)

Third Eyesight was recently asked by a multi-billion dollar global consumer brand to facilitate a round-table discussion focussing on the issue of how to drive ethical behaviour and sustainable business models into their sector. This company has a well documented strategy and action plan until 2020, and their team was travelling together in India visiting other corporate and non-corporate initiatives, to learn from them.

For the round table, we brought together brands, retailers, manufacturers, compliance audit and certification agencies, craft and community oriented organisations and non-government organisations (NGOs working on environment stewardship. Some were intrinsically linked to the consumer goods / retail sector, others were not. Among those present was Ramon Magsaysay award winner Mr. Rajendra Singh of the Tarun Bharat Sangh, an organisation that has, over the last several years, worked in recharging thousands of water reservoirs leading to the rebirth of several rivers.

The diversity (and sometimes total divergence) in views among the participants was a powerful driver for the debate during the day, which was the main intention behind having a really mixed group.

(Try this experiment yourself. Get a bunch of people together who define their work as being in the “corporate responsibility” stream. Then ask them the meaning of that phrase, and watch the entirely different tracks people move on. You might be left wondering, whether they are really working towards a common goal.)

At the end, though, the result was productive, since the divergent perspectives opened avenues that may have previously not been visible.

In the case of our discussion, the topics that were covered included labour standards and compliance, reduction of the product development footprint, closed-loop supply chains, water management, organic raw materials, energy conservation and community involvement in business. Some of the issues raised were:

• How are learnings from green factories consolidated and disseminated to other suppliers?
• How do companies plan to continue to support sustainability and corporate responsibility initiatives considering the drastic economic changes and the dire retail scenario?
• What does fair trade have to do with sustainability?
• Minimum wage Vs living wage
• Trade barriers and the need for government support for green products
• Why labour laws are not being followed? Are the laws outdated and impossible to follow? Are there any other reasons, which could be dealt with by companies themselves?
• Can consumer consciousness and pressures be brought to bear? Does the question “Is the product I am buying ethically produced” come in the mind of an Indian consumer? Or even to the mind of the Indian retailer?
• The need to address the core issue of unbalanced demand and supply of workforce in cities.
• What should responsible and aware companies do to stop other companies from polluting rivers and water systems?
• The role of village craft in providing learnings on efficient and responsible use of resources

My view is that these diverse areas and views can be aligned most effectively if we look at responsibility and sustainability in all its dimensions. These dimensions, to my mind, are:

– The Environment

– The Community

– The Organisation

– The Individual

(Post continuing from above.)

Here is a suggested list to start with, which we can use to try out thought-experiments, viewing each issue in different dimensions and from different points of view (for example, buyer based in a developed market, supplier based in a developing country, an individual working in the supply chain, his family and broader community):

• child / family labour
• fair pricing and fair compensation across the supply chain, including consumer, retailer, supplier, workers
• replacement of cottage scale production with large-scale industrial production of goods
• setting up production in cities versus in villages
• organic versus inorganic
• synthetic / genetically modified versus natural raw materials

In closing, let me come back to “Babel”. According to the Book of Genesis, a huge tower was built “to the heavens” to demonstrate the achievement of the people of Babylon who all spoke a single language, and to bind them together into a common identity. God apparently was not particularly happy with this self-glorifying attitude, and gave the people different languages and scattered them across the earth. 

Whatever your religious (or non-religious) affiliation, this story holds a gem of a lesson.

No matter how noble the cause of the corporate responsibility warrior, it is good to be humble and allow diversity rather than trying to capture everyone under one monolith with an apparently common goal. The diversity may be a lot more productive and help to spread the benefits wider than one single initiative.

The day that we spent on the sustainability round-table certainly demonstrated that very well.

A keystone of a retailer’s business is the loyalty that customers show in shopping at his or her store.

Loyal customers help to sustain a basic level of sales and reduce the need for expensive broadcast-style marketing spending that the store may otherwise have to do in order to keep the traffic and business flowing. This is as true for chain-stores as it is for independent mom-and-pop stores.

Therefore, as competition increases along with the number of stores selling the same products within a common catchment, retaining the loyalty of the customer becomes crucial, both in terms of strength of relationship (which is reflected in how much of the total spend the customer spends at the specific store) as well as the duration of the relationship.

In some parts of the more developed markets regulation may prevent the overcrowding of grocery stores and supermarkets. However, in markets such as India, one can see as many as four or five mini-supermarkets coming up on barely a kilometre along a busy street, before you even count the numerous kiranawalas. How can a store ensure a continued loyal custom from a certain share of that catchment?

Managers at modern chain stores may draw some comfort from studies which suggest that customers with higher incomes tend to be more “loyal” than customers with lower incomes. Since Indian chain stores tend to be targeted on high-income customers when compared to the traditional kiranawala, they may benefit from an intrinsically more loyal base of customers.

The variety of factors behind this “loyalty” may essentially boil down to the fact that with rising incomes the perceived benefit – lower prices, potentially better products or service – from comparing alternative stores may be outweighed by the perceived cost (time) of seeking these options and the personal adjustment involved in shopping in an unfamiliar environment. (Or, perhaps, to put it more bluntly: “rich customers couldn’t be bothered”?)

However, as the number of competing offers increases, promotional noise draws the consumer’s attention to benefits they might be missing out on, whether this is through flyers in the mailbox, kiosks set up near the consumer’s primary store, or even a full-blown ad campaign across multiple media. With every new offer or promotion, there is a temptation to try out an unfamiliar retailer.

This is more acute during recessionary times, when just about every competitor is shouting out deals to lure the customer to at least step into their store. And don’t think that high income customers are immune from the “toothpaste-discount” bait. During such times, whether they acknowledge it or not, everyone is down-shifting. It is at such times that loyalty is truly called upon. And it is also at such times when retailers start to think of loyalty schemes.

Most loyalty schemes are focussed on the objective of retaining existing customers through the use of incentives that are available only to loyalty programme members. They will ask a customer to provide some personal and contact information, and will provide some reference – a set of coupons to be redeemed during future purchases, or a card (index, swipe or smart) – that must be presented during subsequent transactions. In almost all cases, there is an attempt at getting the customer to return to the store because, as we all know, when we step into a store to redeem anything, almost without exception we end up shelling out more money than the redemption is worth. Since the value of the cash-back equivalent can be anywhere between 1 and 10 per cent (sometimes higher) customers are happy with the bribe, while the store is happy to ring up the additional sales.

However, it is surprising – or perhaps not – how many loyalty schemes turn into shams. In many such cases, the true benefits and the liabilities during the life cycle of the loyalty programme or of the customer’s relationship with the store have not been considered deeply enough. We all have multiple examples from our personal lives, which offer valuable lessons on such shambolic “loyalty schemes”. For instance:

• An oil company’s “membership card” that you pay for, whose points can never be redeemed because you never get the points statement nor a list of rewards, and the last time you see the card is when the petrol pump attendant takes it with the promise to check the status with the company.
• “Reward points” which offer a customer a second-rate bag or an uncertain brand of electrical gadget for points PLUS a cash amount that would be the equivalent of what you might spend with a pavement retailer buying a similar item.
• A credit card that looks attractive with discounts at certain merchant establishments, until you discover that someone who doesn’t hold that card is getting the same benefit even on cash payment.

Very often we find that a loyalty scheme has been conceived by an executive in charge of advertising to get the message out more cheaply (?) and focussed on a set of frequent customers. There is little link with the other parts of the operation, such as merchandising, store planning, or even promotion management, and certainly no influence. Thus, a second and potentially more powerful objective – using customer shopping data to tighten merchandising and improve the targeting of promotions – is virtually ignored.

Some companies have decided that managing a loyalty programme would offer lower benefits than the cost of maintaining the scheme, and decide to pass on the amount to the consumer directly in the form of lower prices. However, given the times, and the prospective goldmine of consumer purchase information that consumers willingly provide through such transactions (despite all vocal concerns about privacy) I would expect loyalty schemes to mushroom in the next few years.

The fact is, whatever our income levels, evolution has deemed that we become creatures of habit. Once a certain path has been followed successfully, a berry has been eaten safely, a transaction has been made satisfactorily, we are inclined to return to it again and again.

Trust, predictability and precedence are huge factors in developing loyalty, and when translated into the modern life of shopping (especially for food and groceries), this translates into the phenomenon that has been called first store (or primary store) loyalty. This can lead to as much as almost 70 per cent of grocery shopping being carried out at one store. Typically consumers will have a strong secondary store, and the balance grocery shopping would be split between multiple stores based on product availability, convenience and opportunity, deals and other factors.

But just because customers are genetically wired for loyalty to the familiar, the retailer should not treat this loyalty with contempt. Or even laziness. Because that can tip over the loyalty scheme into being a loyalty sham. And that is it only one letter away from “scam” – a dangerous label in these times of the consumer-activist.

By Sangita Ghosh

Images Retail

December 2008

THE INDIAN RETAIL SCENARIO HAS BEEN WITNESSING SIGNIFICANT ADVANCEMENT WITH TRADITIONAL RETAIL FORMATS MAKING WAY FOR MORE INNOVATIVE AND TECHNOLOGICALLY EVOLVED FORMATS. ONE OF THE INNOVATIONS TO WATCH OUT FOR IS THE ‘RETAIL KIOSK’, WHICH TRULY MAKES BUSINESS SENSE FOR RETAILERS BECAUSE OF ITS COST BENEFIT STRUCTURE AT THE ‘POINT OF SALE’ ESTABLISHMENT PROCESS AND EASE AND CONVENIENCE FOR THE CUSTOMERS TOO.

The concept of ‘Kiosk Retailing’ in the Indian retail scenario was virtually unknown until a few years-ago. Over the past few years, however, retail kiosks or mall kiosks have become an increasingly ubiquitous component of the retail and real estate landscape. The kiosk concept started gaining broad-based acceptance and success among the international retailers in the 90s; the model is now gradually getting a foothold in India.

Certainly, there are reasons for a kiosk scoring over a full size store – in terms of presenting a cozy yet convenient and eye-catching venue to attract the impulse buyers that pass through a mall aisle or a shopping centre space. According to Devangshu Dutta, CEO, Third Eyesight, "Kiosk retail can be defined by the presence of outlets with a small physical space in an open format with ‘temporary’ or even mobile fit-outs, but may be stationed at a place for a long time. The structure of a kiosk could be designed as a standalone structure like a terminal, or a semi-enclosed booth."

In general terms, kiosk retailing programmes are specified as ‘speciality leasing programmes’ and the retailers are called ‘speciality retailers’. Dutta says that any product that does not require a large amount of storage, can be sold without any preparation and served with minimal staff, is an ideal to be traded through the limited and open format of a kiosk. These can include physical products such as snacks, jewellery, holiday merchandise, novelties, or services such as financial products, simple medical check-ups, grooming and services etc.

The benefits of a kiosk format include:

• Avoiding unnecessary in-store product inventory and associated warehouse costs
• They offer promotional opportunities for the retailer
• Help increase active footfalls for mall owners
• Reduce input costs by lowering employee headcount through self-service and multi-use models
• Offer extremely lean and mean communication
• Facilitate interaction with the service retailers and ease the way of availing their services
• Thus, result in incremental sales even at off-site locations with more compelling revenue returns

In India, retail kiosks can be seen in shopping plazas and malls as small retail outlets to sell products or to facilitate services. A few examples of the retailers leveraging the kiosk opportunity include fruit juice brand Mr. Orange from MX Foods, Candico India, Boost, wellness retailers such as Kaya Skin Clinic and Lakme, financial companies such as ICICI Bank, Citi Financial and Reliance Money, holiday package providers such as Club Mahindra or insurance firms such as Max New York Life Insurance etc. In each case, the mall allots a space either on rental or revenue sharing basis to the retailer depending on merchandise. A relatively advanced form of kiosk retailing can be seen in Europe and US. In Europe, kiosk retailing has evolved as a special, advantageous and cost-effective category in retailing and is strategically located in the malls at frequent stops. In the US, kiosk retailing has emerged as one of the effective platforms of low-cost, low-risk entrepreneurship. These retail kiosks are also known as ‘creative entrepreneurship’ showcasing product categories such as handicrafts or other essential low-budget home improvement essentials or personal usage products. One of the leading global kiosk consultants and trade magazine publisher Patricia Norins quoted that in the US about 25 percent of the 50,000 -plus kiosks in shopping malls are owned or operated by recent immigrants – thereby giving them a low-risk option to establish themselves.

STARTING OUT
For a greenhorn, kiosk retailing provides easy but effective branding with a much smaller space leading to lower rents but with satisfactory sales that can establish a brand much faster in high-end malls. Candico forayed into the Indian retail scenario with its innovative kiosks designed in Dubai. Mr. Orange sells fresh fruit juice from its orange shaped kiosks that were innovatively designed in Spain. If the concept is applied correctly and effectively in mall spaces, the format of kiosk retailing would prove to be an extremely effective profiting model, turning a large amount of under-utilised floor-space in a mall’s common area into an innovative revenue stream.

THE FORMATS
As the face of Indian retail changes, the structure, design, functionality and application of retail kiosk is also evolving. Generally ‘kiosk’ refers to a booth-like structure where simple and inexpensive merchandise in isolation is sold. But of late", the retail kiosk has evolve&" from this typically four-sided, square structure to a limitless array of colours, shapes and designs selling ice cream to jewellery to service messages from concepts financial giants and real estate companies. Then, there are technically evolved electronic kiosks, also known as ‘interactive kiosks’, where a customised software enables the user to access the system flawlessly for a specific purpose. This structure could simply be a standalone computer terminal with a keyboard or the latest touchscreen facility, financial services or simply a tool to disseminate free public service information. As outlined by Technopak, retail kiosks in India have evolved in two formats. The first variant is in the form of a small-sized shop, having a semi-permanent fixture and is generally present within a larger establishment such as a mall, department store, etc. In India, there are quite a good number of F&B retailers across categories who have explored the idea of retailing through kiosks – Candy Treats, Cookie Man, Domino’s, Yo! China, Cafe Coffee Day, Corn Man, Baskin Robbins, Mr. Orange, Nestle etc.

The second variant is the much advanced and technically inclined e-kiosks, which are largely services oriented and generally unmanned. One of the pioneers in this is Reliance Money, which began its operations since its very inception through kiosk retailing to reach out to as many customers as possible. Sudip Bandyopadhyay, CEO and director, Reliance Money, sees a lot of promise in this format, saying, "Kiosks are going to prove like ATMs, which revolutionised the banking industry. We hope our kiosks will change the way people avail financial services over a period of time." Reliance Money, at present, has a vast network of 2,500 retail kiosks at different places across the country based on target customer availability and accessibility.

WHY A KIOSK?
While kiosks can be very profitable for the owner of the real estate considering the high rent, some developers also use kiosks to make the retail environment more dynamic and fluid. This, according to experts, shows the trend of a positive future for the retail kiosks in India.

Rakesh Pandey, CEO for Kaya Skin Clinic, clarifies, "Be it brand building or business generation, the clarity of the parameter itself guides the financial implications of the kiosk model. Through kiosks, are you being able to capitalise on the short window of opportunity with a potential client at the venue? It’s important to remember that a potential client’s live experiences at a kiosk can either positively pre-dispose or completely turn off the client from the brand." Spencer’s Hyper, where Kaya has opened its retail kiosks, is of the opinion that the main retailer should be careful about the kiosk retail partner; the products retailed at the kiosks should have business synergies and target the same market segment. Samar Singh Sheikhawat, VP-marketing, Spencer’s Retail Ltd, elaborates, "Since modern retailing is all about the shopping experience, the partners in kiosk retailing should ensure that they conform to the quality standards and service level agreements as does the main retailer. This is to ensure that consumers have the same experience whenever they avail of any product from a particular retail outlet."

According to industry experts, innovatively positioned kiosks can become the centre of attraction in a mall and create a vibrant environment ensuring higher footfalls and revenue for the shopping centre owner. To create freshness or for a change in the shopping floor environment, one kiosk can be inter-changed with another temporarily, otherwise impossible with a full size retail store. Analysts point out that with the strategic point of sales coupled with the catchy placements in the shopping centres, the kiosk is becoming the new pull for both realtors and shoppers. When the retail kiosks offer services to the customers, it also increases consumer awareness and proposes new strategies for the retail brands to further diversify their business in multiple directions.

The Kaya Skin Clinic, for instance, has prototyped the kiosk model to make expert skin-care easily accessible. Pandey shares, "With the kiosk model, the idea for Kaya was to ‘go where are clients are’, thereby saving their time and also aiding them to make accurate decisions about their skin-care needs." For Kaya, cosmetics account for the majority of sales from these kiosk counters. ‘According to the chain, skin-care product sales contribute to 30-35 per cent of the total sales for the brands that sell both cosmetics and skin-care products through this format.
Bandyopadhyay at Reliance Money says, "Our kiosks are additional touch points for our customers to avail services and it would not be possible to measure revenues separately. Our customers can go online, use call and trade, visit our branches or avail services through kiosks. The same customer may use different modes at different points of time based on his or her convenience."

Coffee Day Xpress, from Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Ltd, serves food at kiosks called ‘Xpress’ for those who need a quick bite on the move. The growth of Coffee Day Xpress also comes from its innovative franchising model. The low-investment, high-return business model has proved popular with entrepreneurs who are eager to cash in on the brand’s ‘plug-and-play’ kiosk concept that can get started within 10 days of the franchise agreement.

THE MERCHANDISING STRATEGY
The format of the kiosk, its position and its usability demand a specialized merchandising strategy. As observed by Technopak, the low value and impulse purchase appeal facilitate the usage of kiosks for product categories that consume less space – eateries, banking solutions, telecom services, flowers, tobacco, books and music and fashion accessories. Besides these, innovative e-kiosks, which provide multiple services such as ticketing, payment of bills etc. and self-service -kiosks for photo development, are also in vogue. Also, companies are increasingly using kiosks for information dissemination and promotional activities. Punit Khanna, principal consultant, Technopak Advisors, says, "Products that consume less space and are as tentative as impulse purchase items, are best suited for kiosks." Based on the nature and format of the kiosks, the merchandising strategy is crafted. Kaya Skin Clinic – with focus on creating awareness among health-conscious consumers and future clients – has a typical merchandising strategy whereas Reliance Money, which operates self-service kiosks, has no merchandising and depends on software for communication and backend operation. Kaya kiosks have following features:

• Focus on POP material to communicate message
• Take-away skin-care literature to draw the visitor to their clinics
• Arranging skin-care camps along with skin counsellors, doctors for individual consultation
• Skin-care camps arranged usually on weekend, at a high-footfall area in a mall or department store

Coffee Day Xpress is a modular kiosk of 60 sq.ft that can easily be set up in short notice. For that, they maintain a specific merchandising strategy with an ease and less complicated and ready-to-eat food on their menu. Other characteristics include:

• Each kiosks comes fully equipped with a hot coffee – bean-to-cup machine, a cold coffee and a thick shake machine, a blender, pastry cooler, microwave oven, griller, and a refrigerator, to serve quickly
• Easy to maintain and clean
• Available in both indoor and outdoor modules

THE BUYERS
Kiosks retailing is driven by impulse shopping and is clearly targeted towards consumers ‘on-the-move’. The customers increasingly see a mall as a leisure zone; stopping by a kiosk and trying out a relatively low value item such as a glass of orange juice or a pack of candy or something higher up in the value chain such as sunglasses or watches is a natural activity in that environment.

“The target customers for a kiosk are the passers-by – often impulse buyers. Therefore, the merchandising and display has to be ‘alive’ and should be able to reach out to grab the customer’s attention in the busy environment,” Dutta points out.

Retail kiosks also have the USP of setting up interesting point of sales, catchy positions and attractive product lines resulting in satisfactory sales figures in comparison to the retail space they occupy, which can be replaced at times for variations.

STRATEGISING THE LOCATIONS
Most analysts agree that the ideal criteria for location selection that a kiosk model looks for should be focused on high traffic, high visibility areas at mall atriums, inside department stores, hypermarkets or supermarkets, and places with higher footfalls such as airports, railway stations and a metro stations. However, meeting these criteria demand high investments from the retailers. Says Dutta, “Kiosks work well in areas with high footfall and high off-take, where the rentals per square foot would also be high. Therefore, the financials of a kiosks generally require high gross margins.”

According to Ali Mir, GM – retail, NCR Corporation, a technology company for Retail Kiosk solutions, “The strategic locations for a kiosk should be at the store entry, entrance of a department in a store, mall entrance, at each floor of a mall closer to the elevators, food courts etc. that give the kiosk higher visibility and footfall.” Kaya Skin Clinic, which banks on its retail kiosk network critically, considers the following factors before finalising a kiosk location:

• Footfall in the mall and that particular location, and the average ticket size of the mall to measure the trend of the weekend skew
• Direction of footfall and also shopper’s mood when visiting their kiosk
• The visibility of the location
• TG of the particular mall or store
• Demographic and psychographic profile of the residential catchments

While the chain is quite enthused by the kiosk format, the extremely high rentals for kiosks, and the point of furthering the ‘no-escalation clause’ of the lease that usually expires after 11 months, can hinder the spread of a kiosk network.

Spencer’s, which has kiosks in its 70 stores, is certainly banking on the point of high rental but at the same time they entertain hopes of ensured returns. According to Sheikhawat, “Kiosk retailers need to be judicious with respect to the financial model they agree to. It can either be revenue sharing or a flat rental, but that of course depends on what is more profitable to the retailer.” High rental payout is definitely something that is currently queering the pitch for this mini-store format. Bandyopadhyay of Reliance Money says, “The rent for the location and the space required to put up the kiosk is very high, sometimes unrealistic and extremely critical. High-footfall retail space is very expensive and the cost-benefit ratio needs to be carefully analysed. The retailer and the mall owner need to understand the same and fine tune the strategy accordingly.”

GOING FORWARD
According to the experts, not just start-ups or speciality retailers but major retail chains and established brands are also looking for kiosk solutions to enhance their retail presence. Even big-box retailers are looking for an easy, convenient and cost-effective solution though network of retail kiosks. According to Khanna of Technopak Advisors, “Given that locations favourable to the kiosk format, such as mall atriums, railway stations, metro stations, airports etc, are being rapidly developed in India, we shall witness a larger proliferation of this format.” Khanna also states that retail kiosk is increasingly spreading beyond the F&B sector to include other products/services as well. Going forward, retailers will increasingly invest in this format for the multiple benefits of:

• Flexibility in moving or transporting to a different location whenever required
• Easy utilization in a format of low investment and of low overheads
• Swift roll-out
• Convenience of 24X7 retail with e-kiosks

Experts say the pace at which Indian retail transactions are increasing, it clearly highlights the need for a more technically developed solution that is designed to constantly evolve with changing needs. The trend shows the need for 24X7 self-service kiosks that mimic the ecommerce model. Demanding customers and best practices adopted by global retail giants are driving Indian retailers to harness the benefits of self-service technology of retail kiosks in bringing efficiencies and retaining consumers. Starting from ordering the products to delivering the same at customer’s doorsteps, cash transaction and checkout self-service kiosks are making an impression. The concept has taken off well and is now being considered as a mode to spread awareness and promote the products across categories.

However, experts caution that too many kiosks in a mall can create disruption in terms of the prospective footfalls and common area of the mall. Balancing factors need to be designed between the mall owners, retail tenants and the kiosk retailers for a truly win-win solution.

News items seem to be ringing the death-toll for offshoring (Here’s one from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121003574_pf.html.)

Job transitions across borders are an emotive issue at any time, certainly even more so during times of economic upheaval such as now.

But should the debate be about “offshore vs onshore” or about management competence?

A management team whose effort isn’t structured well enough to deliver on their customer’s expectation of a good product (service included) could also find many things on which to pin the blame for poor service, including the geographical location of the support engineers, their native language or what they had for breakfast.

(Or, maybe we should reword the old saying: success has many fathers, but failure is the neighbour’s baby.)

My experiences of phone support around the world range from the superlative to the abysmal, sometimes within the same day in the same country. Painting in broad brush strokes and generalizations (“onshore is high quality and prompt, offshore is low quality and frustrating”) totally miss the point.

The best illustration is when you walk into two brick-and-mortar retail stores on the same high street, and receive dramatically different levels of service. In any country.

To my mind, it is senior management that drives service – vision, culture and the processes. Senior management is responsible for creating the environment, and for creating the hiring and training standards. If you are encultured for fantastic service, your location or origin on the globe is immaterial.

Remote servicing is challenging even without differences in time zones, languages, cultures. The lack of technical or any other sort of individual competence shouldn’t be added to the mix. And that goes for both (onshore) management and (offshore) support staff.

Lastly – followers of BBC sitcoms may be the only ones with whom this might ring a bell – Fawlty Towers should be on the must-watch list for anyone who has anything to do with customer service. Especially if they are part of the management.