The phrase "eating your own dog food" means yourself using a product or service that you offer. If a company eats its own dog food, it means it has confidence in the things that it produces and/or sells. Microsoft made the term popular by using mostly Microsoft products internally. Similarly, at Nagarro, our internal portals, bug tracking systems, project management systems, HR systems and websites are all built and maintained by us. We eat our own dogfood.
I am continually reminded of the importance of this. Yesterday I called the customer service desk of Airtel Broadband. "Please put in your landline number starting with the STD code" said an automated voice. So I did. Then it read the number back to me. "Is this correct? Press 1 if correct, press 2 if not". And so I pressed 1. After navigating a maze of menus, I was transferred to a customer support representative. "What is your landline number?" he asked.
That was bad, but not the worst thing that happened. Just to see how customer-friendly this customer-oriented company has managed to make its frontline people (the actual "customer service moment of truth") I decided to give the operator a hard time. "But I just entered the number", I said. "I want your land line number", he said as though I had not heard the first time. "Listen", I said, "I'm telling you I just entered it less than 60 second ago. Then the machine read it back to me and asked me to confirm it. Why must I enter it again?" "I don't understand what you are saying", he said. And he didn't. Not for a long time.
When he finally understood, he acted as though it was totally natural for me to have to give the number again. "Sir, you must have entered it in the IVR." IVR standing for Interactive Voice Response, the automated voice system. "So?" I asked. "Sir the IVR is for other things. You of course have to give it to me again." He was talking as though he was addressing some idiot, rather than being even mildly understanding or apologetic.
I think things might have been different if he had been trained from the other side - how it feels to be on the outside calling into Airtel Broadband.
Once in a while, put aside that corporate lunch and eat your own dogfood!
5 comments:
Respected Sir,
Rightly pointed out Sir.
I would like to share one more experience about the seller-customer incident in a small RETAIL MEDICAL SHOP. i bought some essentials and which cost me Rs 48/- and asked him to give me HALLS of Rs 1/- and return me a rupee change. He asked me to take HALLS of Rs 2/- so that he could not have to return the change. I asked him if the customer doesn't need one why he/she should buy?. He simply replied AISA HI HOTA HAI.
Seema Patil
Hello Sir,
All companies should learn this phrase and implement too. I read Cisco's article in last Economist issue. They are also using their own product "Telepresence" for meetings. The number of TelePresence meetings at Cisco averages 5,500 a week. This has also helped the firm to cut its annual travel budget by $290m, or more than half of total.
Not only companies we also have to apply this in our life. Once one person was fond of eating "Gud" very much. He asked to Gandhi ji that " i want to leave this habit, how can i do it"? Gandhi ji gave answer after around 7 days and suggested some ways to leave it. Then that person again asked, why you took 7 days to reply. Then Gandhi ji said "I was also eating Gud very much, so before asking to anyone to leave it, firstly i had to leave it.
So before telling something to anybody we should also follow this principle.
Dear Sir,
This is the stark reality of Indian corporates today specifically the Telecom service providers are not aware of their customer needs and requirements and their customer response executives are so called not trained in a proper manner and so this shows a laxity in our system,I wonder sometimes when will our telecom companies realize to cater to needs of their customers.
The latest: a bank that has an automated system call my wife every day. It exhorts her to take a loan and touts its offering. Yet it forgets to mention which bank it is talking about!
(Perhaps just as well for such an annoying feature.)
Hello Sir,
Thanks for sharing! This post has helped me in developing my thought process. Now maybe I'll be more observant while using any product or service.
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