Now that I have your phone number, date of birth, credit card number, credit limit, your monthly income, have a pizza.

Have you ever felt neglected in a shop? Companies spend billions and trillions on implementing a CRM system and the system fails miserably and come back to us, saying that CRM implementation failed.

CRM is not a computer system, it is a methodology that comes from the brain, from the courtesy, from the manners. If you have no manners before implementation of CRM, chances are your CRM is going to fail, become annoying for your customer and you will lose thousands of them. But a effective CRM is going to give you 119% ROI, yes you heard me right, 119% and without spending a single dollar.

I walked into Dominoes, Wakad, with intentions of eating a cheese burst pizza. As this dominoes was closed by to my office, it was good idea to step in for a Friday evening. That day as luck would have it, their computer system were facing some problems. (As a computer engineer, I should say, computer systems follow the 50-50-90 rule, if there is 50-50 chances of getting a thing right, there is 90% guarantee you will get it wrong, don't blame us, blame the universe) So apparently some computer glitch, made their day the worst one. Even mine, as I was about to find out.

After ten minutes, my order came by and it was a hand tossed pizza. Imagine my shock, when there was no cheese in a pizza, and frankly a pizza without cheese is like body without soul. Angry, distressed, I silently vowed not to visit them again, and complaint to the agent.

She realized a goof-up and was not shaken, she immediately smiled and replied,
'I am so sorry sir, we have a problem with our computer system. Why don't you have that pizza, on the house, and I send your cheese burst behind it,' oh wow, thats nice, free pizza, 'And for your inconvenience, have this coke, its on us.'

Now thats, Customer Service. What did she loose? A 25 bucks worth of coke and a 150 bucks worth of Pizza? From this experience, I have eaten atleast 10 times in the same joint, ordering 10 cheese burst amounting to 3000 bucks. Now, tell me what was her ROI?

A good customer service does not mean you spend billions of dollars on computer system, it means you spend few minutes understanding your customer and then hiring the computer system to facilitate your staff.