Customer Loyalty : Tanishq an example

#Tanishq is a well respected and trusted brand from the House of Tata's. It has built its reputation over a period of time by adhering to fair practices and processes. This in an industry where either you went to your family jeweller or you were always skeptical of what you were buying. But even your family jeweller was not always trust worthy. You realised this, much to your dismay and a feeling of being betrayed, when you traded in your old jewellery for new ones in one of the big branded stores like Tanishq.

Now this trust is hard earned and is transactional. By this I mean it is earned over a period of time through the many positive transactions that you have had with the brand. And typically your interactions are not very frequent. Either occasion based or around festival time. So it is slow build. The brand takes great pain in perfecting its processes to ensure that the consumer does not get an opportunity to doubt the brand on its intentions.

Question is whether a single bad interaction is enough to lose this trust in the brand.

I will try to answer this in the context of my interactions with Tanishq. I have been a regular and loyal customer of Tanishq over the years. Typically investing in their Golden Harvest schemes. The reason why I shifted from our regular jeweller was the underlying belief that Tanishq means well and will never take me for granted or any interaction of theirs will shake the foundation of trust in the brand.

Every year around the time of maturity of the scheme me and my wife would visit the Tanishq store and usually end up spending at least double if not more than double the scheme amount. It was an annual pilgrimage of sorts for my wife. It always was a good experience up until now.

This year something went wrong. We did buy something which was more than double the scheme amount. However my wife wanted to change the design of the earring by removing one element. It was clear that we would be actually needing less gold than what we were paying for. But we were told that the process is that we pay, get the delivery and then Tanishq will refund the excess. So we paid for it in full at the beginning of December'17. The modified earring we got delivery in the beginning of January. At the time of delivery I was told that the refund will take 3/4 business days.

It so turned out that despite repeated followups we finally got the refund only at end of February. What was jarring was the complete apathy of the staff at the store in addressing my query. Responses ranged from, it is in our regional office to the person is on leave to the Manager telling me one day that you have just informed me now and I will look into it. Even a post on their Facebook Page evoked no response. So most unlike what I expected from Tanishq.

At this point I had lost all trust in Tanishq as a brand. A little later I thought let me put this experience in perspective. One badly handled transaction over a long period of time. Maybe limited to a set of two to three persons in that store. Maybe the fact that I had not renewed my golden harvest scheme made that set of people believe that I was not going to visit their store again so they should not care.

Should I stop going to Tanishq or move to another jeweller. Mostly I am going to stay with Tanishq because I have rationally analysed this incident and arrived at the conclusion that

But most consumers will not look at it rationally especially in a category like this which has a lot of emotion attached to it as well. They will simply move to another competitor and the years of trust and loyalty will be overcome due to an individual or two which rationally speaking does not represent the brand. But at a transactional level the company person interfacing with the consumer is the face of the company and all his actions or lack of them will be construed as those of the company.

Something to think about.