BT dot.com/@ Work; We're All e-Ars!

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We're All e-Ars!

Godrej-GE is using e-commerce to e-listen to the customer. And she's watching.

By Radhika Dhawan

If we don't, we die.'' Well CEO Vijay Crishna is right, Godrej-GE-the name is the ghost of a dissolved partnership since General Electric is pulling out of the joint venture-has postponed both death as well as e-commerce. Instead, the white goods-manufacturer and -marketer is using the Netspace to connect to its customers-and to listen to them.

You won't see any signs of it at www. godrejge.com-yet. The site, managed by Web consultants Planetasia, offers the typical combination of product information and the whereabouts of dealers and service-agents that the majority of corporate Websites is still limited to. Interactivity is restricted to a section where customers can, for instance, key in the dimensions of a room, and find out what size of air-conditioner will suit their need. On-line product ordering? Customised configurations? After-sales service? Forget it. All that buyers of the company's products can do for now is complain through e-mail.

Ho-hum.

Er, not quite. Customers and competitors don't know it yet, but Godrej-GE's use of the Net is going to be different. For, customer relationship-management, and not on-line sales, will be the initiating point on its Net strategy. Says Crishna, 53: ''We are starting with the simpler applications first to build customer interaction, and then upgrading them.''

May We help You?

The company is setting up a Virtual Call Centre (VCC) at the beginning of its roadmap on the Web. Godrej-GE was a pioneer in starting an intelligent call centre in 1997, using a toll-free number to have customers call in with their queries and complaints, which are dealt with by a team trained for the purpose, armed with a menu of structured responses and a computerised system enabling them to identify every customer's profile, product-history et al immediately. Now, the idea is to offer the same service in real-time, through the Net.

Tough call? You bet. Sure, using the Web enables the company to walk a customer graphically through a product, or even handle hundreds of customers simultaneously. What it cannot do, however, is to completely transplant the human interface on the Net. Sure, a set of simple questions and answers could determine which product the consumer has and what the problem is. But beyond a point, the tree-structure of the diagnostics will not be able to answer the customer's query. That's why Godrej-GE is working on the next level of interaction: a live chat-of the kind that Rediff, for one, has implemented. As soon as Net telephony is legalised, it will add that format too.

But will customers use the Net the way the company wants them to? To figure that out, Crishna's e-team placed interactive kiosks at the premises of a few key dealers in Mumbai. These are experimental visual interface versions of the VCC, whose use the company will monitor. This is the first step in helping determine how to structure information on VCCs as a selling tool. Says Crishna: ''Whenever the customer wants information, the organisation should be easily accessible through some format.''

But First, We have to Learn

Obviously, the learning from the call centre operations, which have received 450,000 calls over the past couple of years, will be transferred to VCCs. About 65 per cent of the calls are field requests, covering installation and product-usage issues. The remainder deal with dissemination of information, like product information and dealer and service-agents locations. Therefore, the company has extensive databases on customer profiles and their queries. In fact, the 2-year operations have enabled Godrej-GE to build a superb information-base about its customers.

It has also developed some performance benchmarks. For instance, the call agent has to try and keep conversations down to less than 3 minutes. This restriction not only ensures that the system can handle a more optimum load, but also that the caller's query or problem is addressed in the least possible time because the customer's attention-span starts deteriorating after 3 minutes. These databanks and benchmarks will be used by the VCCs too.

To ensure that all the information that she wants can be called up by the customer, Godrej-GE has spent the past 2 years streamlining its supply chain through intranet connectivity with suppliers and putting in place an ERP system. Explains Anwar Bagdadi, 45, General Manager (Information Management), Godrej-GE: ''If you don't have excellent back-end processes in place, your business-to-customer interaction will never work.'' Of course, that's not enough. Since the company must be able to match performance to the promises made to the customer, it has also been working on aligning the results of its processes to the demands made by the information flow.

Says G. Sunder Raman, 46, vice-president (Quality & Strategic Planning), Godrej-GE: ''The information-flows have to be matched by the physical flows in a manufacturing-intensive set-up like ours. If that doesn't happen, you get into deep trouble.'' Listen up. For, Godrej-ge is actually making its e-fication the pivot of process changes within the organisation. That's a case of real transformation through virtual operations.

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