Customers revenge

The s Revenge Read The s Revenge case study and the invited commentaries on it. Then answer the following questions How do you think Atida should deal with their unhappy customers? Should they keep their existing policy or should it be revised? Explain your answer.
Atida should turn their unhappy customers into advocates and view customer complaints as an opportunity to personally engage with them and not as a bother that needs to be removed from the queue of their call centers.
At present, Atida’s customer service mindset is not aligned to a customer-centric policy but rather of getting rid of customer’s problems and being legalistic about their policies. Obviously, Atida’s existing policy must be revised because it is not responsive to customer’s needs and perceive the company as a car manufacturer and not as company that delivers service.
2) Would you define Atida as a customer-centric company? Why or why not? Provide evidence from the case to support your answer.
I will not define Atida as a customer-centric company. They view customer’s complaints as a means to extort from the company by unreasonable customers. This is very evident with how they handled the complaints of Tom and Jessica. It is very disturbing that after a strong letter from loyal customer (Tom Zacharelli) was sent to the company threatening with negative publicity and a lawsuit, Lisa instead replied that “ It’s not a legal problem . . . They say this customer can certainly hire a lawyer, but once customers understand how much pursuing the legal option will cost, they almost always see things differently. They take their loss, and they move on.” And statements such as “ our only obligation is to fi x the car and nothing more” and sticking to a policy “ for handling this stuff, one we’ve been following for decades”. Deducing from these statements, Atida thinks that they are just a manufacturing company where they just build cars and abandon their customers when they ask for customer service support. When customers complaint and call them, they look at it as a bother and not an opportunity to engage with their customers. This was very evident with Lisa’s mindset that their job is to get rid their phone lines with customers not realizing that getting rid their call centers of customers calling them do not mean that they have solve the customer’s problems.
3) Atida hires you as a consultant to help them improve their relationships with customers. What would be the three main recommendations that you would give them?
First, I will revise the company’s existing policy to become more customer-centric. This includes a vision and a mission to make customers happy with their cars and with their engagement with us.
Second, I will revise the company employees’ mindset about customers. To achieve this, I will implement a company-wide reorientation and training about customer service for the company’s culture to change to a more service oriented one. I will introduce a service culture where each employee in the company will strive to satisfy the customers instead of getting rid of them. Lisa will be trained first and other managers will follow.
I will recall the call center in India and put it back in the US. Customer service for an automobile business is a highly technical job and too important for it to be sourced out half across the world where the company’s reaction to customer’s issues is slow and impersonal.
In the immediate, I will personally talk to Tom who is a loyal customer either with Skype or a phone call and apologize for all the trouble that our car has caused him. The apology would be more effective if Jim will reimburse Tom’s out of pocket expenses, repair the car and give Tom token of apology which could be in the form of free maintenance of the car for its entire duration.