The thing with rabbit holes is that they’re slippery. They are deep. But in no way are they the doorway to hell. You know rabbits go in, and rabbits come out. They don’t disappear forever. So if you are deep down the rabbit hole of bad quality and customer complaints destroying your brand, with sales plummeting, there is still hope.
It’s just that real action has to speak more than rhetoric and social media bots. Everyone can see through that, and that has the customers seething even more. A few days back, I wrote an opinion piece on how bad quality and customer complaints can easily kill a startup brand.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
This is especially true in electric mobility, where customers are already taking a leap of faith by switching from a traditional, trusted technology to a new energy source. They are skeptical, and if the product quality and after-sales service support do not meet their expectations, they feel deceived. The negative feedback is louder than it would have been otherwise.
But now, you, as the brand, have already committed that mistake, or as I say, gone down the rabbit hole. What may be the best way to crawl out? Corporations should not go down. Thousands of jobs depend on them. A corporation that has turned the course is any day better than one that has become a footnote in history.
So how does one crawl out? For this, I go to Management 101 to dig out what I call the Triple-A approach.
Acknowledge
Accepting that you made an error with product quality or have ignored issues faced by customers is the first step to correcting them. When we tell the customer that we made a mistake and we are trying to rectify it, that is a pretty comforting communication, and much better than pushing things under the carpet, or worse, silencing the customer through paid social media influencers and bots.
Apologize
Often, a corporation and its founders have larger-than-life egos. The world has toasted them for the success they have had, and any notes of dissonance are treated with contempt. It is human nature narcissism garnished with entrepreneurial supremacy. Being humble comes a decade down the line.
However, as much as we think it’s impossible, apologies from corporations are not uncommon, especially in the automotive industry, and they work really well. We have seen that repeatedly in the past with General Motors. Go back in history to 2008, just before the US government had to bail out the car makers after the financial bust, GM issued a full-page apology advertisement in Automotive News.
While the actual PDF of the advertisement is not available on the net (systematically redacted?), I could find the actual text that was published, and it’s pretty sincere, honest, and as mea culpa as it can go. Here it is, more or less.
“While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times, we violated your trust, by letting our quality fall below industry standards, and our designs became lacklustre. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pickup trucks and SUVs. And we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry. We have paid dearly for these decisions, learned from them and are working hard to correct them by restructuring our U.S. business to be viable for the long-term.”
Obviously, it’s a PR exercise. GM needed to do that because it sought a huge government bailout, which it eventually got. The money was coming from the public, so it made sense to apologise first. But the thing is, it worked. Not that anything changed much at GM; in 2014, CEO Mary Barra was again apologizing publicly for quality issues.
But hey, the thing is that apologies do work, at least for customers and for the management. Mary Barra is still the CEO 11 years later, and a lot of people are still buying GM cars. The company stays relevant and in the race.
Address
Address the issue. Obviously, acknowledging and apologizing are just the decorative steps. The real thing is addressing the problem, and the customer will only return to your brand if they feel that you have addressed the problem. So, if you have a product quality issue, maybe hire some Japanese quality experts to run the ship for you. Royal Enfield did that long back, and it has done magic for them.
But here is where things get a little murky: the jury is still out whether apologizing and acknowledging are smaller than addressing or vice versa.
See, the thing is that there was a time when Tata Motors was not in the reckoning as a car maker because of the quality and image issues related to products like the Tata Indica and the Indigo. This span of time was when Tata was known only for supplying taxi cabs, and the retail customer was not even considering the brand as a purchase option.
Things have since changed for Tata Motors, and it is not because the brand accepted, acknowledged, apologized, or addressed their issues: the jury is out on whether Tata Motors delivers as high-quality service as a Toyota or a Maruti Suzuki. Probably it does. Maybe it does not. But the customer is returning to the showroom more than ever.
Change Things Visually
So, what did change for Tata Motors? I think the biggest change that happened was that they removed everything that the customer hated from the showrooms. If the customer associated the Indica and the Indigo with quality issues and image problems, those disappeared from the showrooms. I think it was Pratap Bose when he took over as the design director of Tata Motors and started delivering the Tiago and the Tigor when things started changing positively for Tata Motors. The Nexon and every product after that have consolidated and cemented Tata Motors and gotten them to where they are today.
That’s my next suggestion as well – if a manufacturer is making scooters that look and are associated with a certain image, then it’s best to just remove those products from the showrooms as fast as possible and replace them with something that looks completely different, radically different.
The customer subconsciously associates the way the product looks with its quality and the service experience they have with the brand. Remove that offensive shape from the showroom, replace it with something radically different, and the customer would give you another chance. There is a reason why automakers have 5-7 product lifecycles, after which the shape and design undergo a radical change. Customers often link bad quality to specific generations of products.
However, the stigma sticks if your products retain the same look even if you made significant changes under the skin.
Change Things Visually…Elsewhere
Most companies in their early stages are personality-driven. People start associating the products on the road with the people running the company. In the age of social media, this means that any complaints against the product automatically amplify to those against the promoter, and vice versa. Not too long back, Tesla faced the brunt of a backlash against Musk.
So if the product and brand have been firmly attached to quality issues, changing the management is a great move. It delinks the company from individuals that people hold responsible, subconsciously, for the bad quality.
Arguably, this is easier to do in professionally run companies where CEOs are appointed by the board and are more willing to take responsibility and ‘amicably’ bow out if things don’t work. This is what Boeing did when planes started falling out of the sky.
Doing that in a promoter-run company is difficult. Promoters, by nature, are more emotionally attached to their creations and would not leave the ship. Considering they are promoters, they likely also own the biggest stack of shares, with the board just being a rubber stamp.
Which means addressing product quality with the product is easier.
Make Visual Quality Better
Customers, even the most knowledgeable ones, associate build quality with visible cues. Skin plastics and paint quality are the most obvious cues. A vehicle, in a developing market like India, is associated with a pride of purchase. At least in the first years of purchase, it is regularly washed, shampooed, and wiped. If the surface panels start looking dated and tired within a year of purchase, the customer feels that he has acquired something with less than par quality.
Changing the plastics, improving the fasteners, and replacing cheap metal with polished ones, even if it drives up the BoM costs, is a good fix to quality perceptions.
