[Arun’s Note: One of our readers – Mr. Mukesh Gupta – has framed a wonderful post in response to an open letter written to Sachin Bansal, CEO/Founder, Flipkart.com, that we featured few days back. I think Sachin Bansal should definitely take a note of this… I am producing the post verbatim as it has appeared on his blog.]
Today, I came across an open letter written to Sachin Bansal, CEO/Founder, Flipkart.com. In this letter, the writer (Sushrut Bidwai) talks about his experience of trying to get his laptop replaced by Flipkart. He also talks about the attitude of the service staff and how they left him feeling frustrated (repeatedly).
This open letter has also induced responses from other customers of flipkart to come in the open and admit that they also had similar experiences when it came to refunds or replacements.
Now, flipkart has the following options:
- Pretend that nothing happened and continue business as usual.
- Take notice of the service failure, take corrective actions to ensure that this is fixed at the earliest. Then continue business-as-usual.
- Put corrective measures in place, reach out to Sushrut and sort out his matter. Also, reach out to the others who have indicated that they went through a similar experience and sort their matter as well.
These steps can address the issue at hand. However, can Flipkart manage to use this incidence, turn it on its head into a great PR activity for itself? I think it can. The question is how? If I were in Sachin’s place, I would write an open response to this letter as below:
Dear Sushrut
First things first. I am really sorry for the harassment caused to you in your transaction with flipkart. I also know that no matter what I say or do, your 40 days of productive time will never be recovered. As a fellow entrepreneur, I understand what a difference such a time frame can have on a business.
However, I also wanted to thank you for taking the time and writing such a long and detailed letter to me. I want to let you know that I personally take responsibility for the actions of my employees and apologize to you for the bad treatment that you have received from Flipkart.
Just so that you know, your open letter has had the following effects on flipkart:
- We have identified the reasons for this service breakdown and have put in place processes and policies to ensure that such an incident never happens again with any other customer. Thanks to you, the service levels at Flipkart will go up a couple of notches which will be appreciated by our future customers.
I would like to invite you to my office so that I can explain how we have ensured that such an experience never happens with any other customer.
Also, I would request you to address our employees on your distress during this period. I hope that this will make our employees more aware, conscious and inspire them to provide better service to our customers.
As a token of gratitude & appreciation (for having taken the time, put in the effort to bring this to our notice and helping all our future customers), I would like to offer to you one book, free of cost, delivered to your home every month, for the next 5 years. You can pick the books and we will deliver it. I know that this can not in anyway bring back the time you lost due to the issue, but hope that you will benefit from the knowledge you gain from the books.
I would also like to take this opportunity and request all our customers to continually engage with us and continue to provide us your valuable feedback. We would like you to believe that delighting you at every interaction is our only objective. Anything short of that is not expected. So, if you think, we are slipping, please provide a helping hand and let me know. I will be ever grateful to you for this help. You can reach me at (his email ID).
Looking forward to meeting Sushrut and delighting all our other customers.
Your’s
Sachin Bansal
Note: This is my way to respond to such a situation. Let’s see what action Sachin takes (or ignores).
Would love to hear what readers think about this…