How often have you complained about poor customer experience at a hotel, an airport, with your telecom operator or even with your neighborhood grocery store? Our guess is more often than you would like.
From the biggest global technology companies to the most customer-friendly brands, there are aspects to customer experience that go amiss despite large budgets or industry best practices. Through 13 relatable stories from Indian businesses, Customer First highlights lapses in customer experience efforts and how these issues were tackled or could have been successfully tackled.
Aggarwal, Varun: - Varun Aggarwal is the Asia Pacific News Editor at Foundry (Formerly IDG Communications). He has been a business journalist for close to two decades having worked with The Economic Times, The Hindu, Reuters and The Indian Express.
He has been actively tracking areas of technology, economic policies, real estate and finance. In doing so, he has interviewed former Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, among many other global leaders.
In his current role, Varun heads the news operations for Foundry publications in the Asia Pacific Region including Computerworld, Network World, InfoWorld, CIO and CSO Online.
He was invited by the US Department of State to meet influential decision-makers in the USA and has interviewed many dignitaries, including former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and other bureaucrats.
Varun has also extensively travelled to the hinterlands of the country to dig out the truths behind some of the government initiatives. He has also been a speaker at various business conferences and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) events.
Mundkur, Jacqueline P.: - Jacqueline P. Mundkur is the CEO of a business advisory and consultancy start-up, The Nxt Levels, where she leverages her rich experience to add sustainable value to organizations focusing on digital integration in CX practice. Apart from being a senior multi-sector professional (FMCG, consumer durables, logistics, telecom and retail), she is also Senior Adjunct Faculty at School of Business Management, NMIMS, Mumbai, on Retail Board of Studies SIMSR and industry mentor, AIC-BIMTECH.
In a career spanning over two decades, she has successfully handled both strategic and operational leadership roles in marketing, customer service, retail sales and enterprise sales and led transformational CX-tech projects which have lifted organizational effectiveness. She has had successful stints with Tiffany Foods Ltd (UAE) and, in India, with Voltas Ltd, Vodafone and AFL-DHL. She has headed CX for all group companies at Future Retail.
She had held workshops and is a regular speaker at industry conferences, in both India and abroad. Her articles have been published in ET Edge, CX Network, CIOReview, ETCIO, Express Computer.
She holds postgraduate degrees (MMS Marketing and MSc) and a Doctorate in Business Administration (Australia).
