Customer Expectations

Last week my parents were scheduled to board a long distance train, but unfortunately the train was late by 15 hours. This we realised after driving 18 kms through Bangalore's messy traffic. Best practice would have been to call up the railway enquiry and seek an update on the timings, which we ignored and directly drove off to the station.

At the station, neither the enquiry counter representative nor the station manager had a clue why the train was late, and they even had no answer when we pestered for an alternative. We had no other option but to tuck our tails and head home. None of the passengers raised a hue and cry, no one asked why a text message was not sent to the passengers scheduled to travel about the inordinate delay, why an alternative train arranged (called rack) to help the hassled passengers.

WHY?

The answer is straightforward. Being a public sector organization having no accountability and customer service being of least importance, the Indian Railways care a hoot about its passengers. Even the passengers, had no expectations from the Railways. And hence the muted reaction.

Customer or passenger delight would have been in the form of having special counters for this particular train, providing discount vouchers towards food, or free stay at the nearby hotels or a simple apology would have worked wonders.

Now if the same have had happened with any of the leading domestic airlines, the passengers would have gone hammer and tongs, and would have raised such a hue and cry that even the ever eager news channels would have pounced upon this and would have termed it as "breaking news". The passengers would have demanded for the audience of the top honchos of the airlines to escalate their respective grievances.

In short they would have made the life of the airline front -end staff, a living hell, and would have demanded for reimbursements, or alternative arrangements, or even threaten a lawsuit for deficiency in customer service.

All this arises out of service expectations, the passengers based on experience do not have any expectation from the Railways, the least expectation is a safe journey, but in case of airlines the expectations are multifold and sometimes over the top.

Will there ever be customer based accountability in the Railways? It could just be a distant dream, and passengers will continue to leave through this nightmare of severe deficiency is customer satisfaction for years to come.