Customer satisfaction is vital for business success, but service quality fails across many industries in India. Businesses often do not provide the reliable, responsive, and empathetic service that customers need. Employees rarely demonstrate courtesy, knowledge, or a focus on customers' interests and needs. While customers in India have low expectations of service, poor customer service can damage businesses by causing customers to switch to competitors or share negative experiences online. For long-term growth, businesses must improve service quality by truly listening to and addressing customers' feedback.

1. Is Customer the “King” in India?
The most important stakeholder in any business is definitely the customer.
Satisfaction of the customer is vital for any organization. In today’s changing
business environment customer satisfaction has to be taken to a completely
different level. Businesses must undoubtedly provide more services in addition to
what they are primarily offering.
The big question that needs to be answered is “what services are being offered to
the customers?” Next question that follows is “are customers truly satisfied by the
services offered?” And finally in “what way is service quality related to customer
satisfaction?”
Service quality in India fails across all industries and sectors. Some of the worst
sectors are retail, utilities, telecom, hospitality, and logistics. It fails miserably on the
dimensions of reliability, assurance, responsiveness, empathy and tangibles.
Most businesses do not provide service as promised. They do not provide perfect
service the first time and provide service at the right time. Informing customers
about when the service will be provided also takes a beating. Customers cannot
trust or depend on the service quality in the dimensions of when and how the
customer service problem would be handled.
How many customers in India have tasted prompt service, absolute willingness from
the customer care to provide help and readily respond to customer queries and
request?
It is quite a rare phenomenon to see employees truly instill confidence in the
customer, make them feel secure about transactions, answer customer questions
with tremendous insight, knowledge and concern. Consistently courteous and good
mannered, polished and perfect etiquette employees are also a rare sight.
I have not always witnessed service teams really understand the needs of
customers; give undivided individual attention to customers, keep the customer’s
best interest in heart and mind and deal with customers in caring fashion.
When we take a look at the tangibility dimension, convenient business hours,
visually appealing materials with service, visually appealing facilities, modern
equipment is not too common. Neat professional appearance of employees is also
not up to the mark.
Surprisingly even though most of us in India have experienced bad customer service
the expectation of receiving is very very low. Even though most Indians value
service over price the real situation is far from this. In spite of customers sharing
their good, bad and ugly experiences on social media sites most businesses in India
still overlook this most important aspect, which is the key to top line, bottom line

2. and sustainable growth. It must also be noted that Indian customers are wary about
giving negative feedback unlike sharing positive experiences.
The employees of the business organizations tamper the customer feedback surveys
with the sentiments of customers. The employees put up a sad face and tell a story
of losing their points, commissions, promotion and job and ask the maltreated
customer to have some mercy and give good rating in the feedback.
Poor customer service can turn the most calm and composed person or customer to
a dirty devil using abusive language and threatening to switch to competitor who
apparently would also be no better in reality.
Business transactions are lost and purchases are not made as a result of poor
service experience especially in industries such as hospitality, telecom, retail, and
airlines, finance, healthcare, logistics.
When will businesses and the people in India understand that when a customer is
listened to they will only spend more and come back to you more often for spending
even more than before not just by themselves but with more customers who are
tapped in by word of mouth.