Verandah July 2023: Powerful ways to lose customers, employees and your organisation’s health

This issue of the Verandah is written by Saikat Ghosh

Last week, I landed up at possibly the largest and most reputed hospital in the city.?

I was helping a family member get a second opinion on what tests had indicated to be a serious cardiac issue. While the infrastructure and facilities were top-notch, the patient experience was less than adequate. Our emotions swung like a pendulum in a storm between anxiety, frustration, anger and helplessness

Right from the incompleteness of the check-in, to the long delayed admission process to a massive goof up with insurance, to an unreasonable 9 hour delay for the discharge, the experience was horrible. To top it, it was appalling to see a pizza outlet in the canteen of the cardiac unit!

Ignoring the patterns

This got me thinking about power.

The hospital had messed up an inherently human experience. However, it and its staff would continue to wield significant power over patients and their caregivers. But they had also embraced a level of unkindness and indifference into their culture.

As a design-led solution provider, we often come across such situations where we see other organisations struggling with this. In such cases, they often lose high performing employees. While each resignation may not matter in the short term, the management often overlooks an underlying ‘pattern’. There is a tendency to put the blame on employees and create a make believe cocoon of indestructibility about the culture. Often, a similar pattern may play out with customers. The belief that these incidents are a reflection of the person and not of the business, is an arrogance and a lack of empathy that derives from a sense of ‘power’.

The unkindness of cab services

It isn’t only limited to service providers. Like in the case of the hospital, these gaps seep into the customer experience of digital products. Here’s another example of it: booking a cab back home, on one of the premier services. When I first booked a cab, the driver called to ask me where I want to go and while he promised to come for the pick up, I could see he was not moving. After waiting for 5-10 min, I canceled the booking, selecting one of the reasons from the drop down menu - driver not moving. I rebooked. I was offered the same driver. I canceled. I moved between premier and economy services. Same driver. I did this about 10 to 15 times. At some point, I started testing the algorithm, more than my patience.

The net result:

• I was quick to mentally label the cab service as ‘unreliable’. I found the inability of a customer to register a complaint during a stressful situation, disheartening. It was almost as if the company was saying ‘we’ as an organisation know better and we’ll decide how the communication happens. I have now switched to using the metro more often(which anyways is a better option). It may not matter to the company because I'm just one in a million customers. But I'm fairly sure I would be in their top 2% customer profiles, based on my usage. Now imagine, many more quitting silently. Suddenly ‘quiet quitting’ will have a different meaning.

As I ponder over it, I realise that I felt that the service providers had significantly more power to decide how my experience would be. My say in the overall matter was minimized.

But is there an antidote?

Maybe looking at organisational culture could be a first step. Cultures are not developed overnight. But as organizations become large and dominant, cracks start to appear. A kind organization is one that would have the self-awareness, humility and means to diagnose these cracks before they become a danger to the organisation’s health.?

More power to kinder organisations!

Verandah is X-Leap's Newsletter that carries the latest perspectives from the team about managing transitions and change. We encourage you to also read the past editions of the newsletter, and subscribe here to get it straight to your inbox!