Beyond the Transaction: How Reliance Home Comfort Builds Customer Loyalty Through Experience
September 30, 2024
Editor's Note: This article is based on an episode of the Experience Better: The CX Podcast. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the original content and intent of the speakers. You can listen to the full episode here.
Shaun: I'm Shaun Jackson, Senior Vice President of Marketing at KUBRA, and I'll be your host for this episode.
Delivering a positive customer experience has a significant upside for businesses. It can result in increased customer loyalty, repeat business, positive word-of-mouth referrals, and even higher lifetime customer value. All of these have the potential to benefit a business's bottom line.
In fact, according to a study by PwC, 73% of people cite customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. By prioritizing customer experience, businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors, build stronger relationships with their customers, and ultimately achieve long-term success. In this episode, Arun Kanagasabapathy, Vice President of Central Services at Reliance Home Comfort, walks us through how his organization has achieved high customer satisfaction for over 60 years through its eight tenets of customer experience.
Fun fact: I happen to be a Reliance Home Comfort customer, and just this morning I paid my latest monthly water heater rental bill. So, Arun and Reliance, you are top of mind for me today. Great to have you on the show. Arun, welcome.
Arun: Hello, Shaun. Thank you for the gracious invitation. I'm really looking forward to being part of your podcast series, and I think this is such a wonderful idea. So, thank you so much for having me.
Shaun: Let's kick things off by learning a little bit about you and your organization. Can you share with our listeners a little bit about Reliance Home Comfort and your specific role there?
Arun: Absolutely. Reliance Home Comfort has been in the business of providing customers comfort in their home for over 60 years. We started off as a company that rented water heaters so that everyone could have hot water whenever they liked. Over the years, we've expanded into a full suite of offerings relating to HVAC, smart home, and insurance products.
The Eight Tenets of Customer Experience
Shaun: That's quite the impressive expansion of your organization. And it sounds like you have something pretty unique, which you call the Eight Tenets of Customer Experience at Reliance. Could you tell me a little bit about how that came about and sort of walk me through those eight tenets?
Arun: I appreciate you saying the word unique, but I don't know that it's unique. I think if you take a look at any one of us, we're all customers. We've all been in that seat and we all have certain expectations. So, all we try to do is make sure that we are encapsulating everything we ourselves would want in an experience or we ourselves make sure that this is what our mother or family member would get every single time.
So, it starts off with:
- Having the best product
- Showing empathy
- Being friendly
- Providing value
- Never stop improving
- The right call (unique to us)
- Leveraging technology
- Having the right partners like KUBRA
The "right call" really encapsulates a lot of the other tenets, but it's put into a formalized mantra that every one of our touchpoints with customers adheres to, be it a call center agent, a tech, or the billing function.
Evolution of the Eight Tenets
Shaun: Reliance has been in business for almost 60 years, which is incredibly impressive. And as you know, at KUBRA, we're setting our sights for 60, having just achieved 30 last year. How have these tenets changed over the course of those 60 years?
Arun: If you were to look at the top five that I talked about - showing empathy, being friendly, providing value - none of those things change. I think almost every company on this planet tries to adhere to those things. Those are just core human values that drive us to ensure we're providing the best experience. So I think those are almost foundational.
The "right call" is just a formalization of that, as I mentioned. The last two have changed. Technology continues to constantly change. And what you want to do is integrate technology that allows you to deliver all of those other precepts in the most efficient manner. And then the right partners change, just because of the changing product suite you have and the different technologies you're introducing. But what you expect from your partners never really changes.
Prioritizing the Tenets
Shaun: Are some tenets more important than others? Or would you say they are all of equal importance? If an organization only has the resources and time to focus on some of these, what would your advice be to them?
Arun: Anything that requires human values, meaning are you investing in your team members, is important. Are you bringing in the right people that espouse the culture that you want? When we talk about empathy, being friendly, providing value, never stop improving, that's about culture. So I think that's very important because it permeates to so many other success factors in an organization.
When you talk about the right partners, if you look at everything we do as a relay race, without our partners, we're just one runner. So you have to have the right partners so that you can fulfill and succeed in the relay race of providing great service to a customer.
Leveraging technology is important, but you don't need technology to be successful. There's this hot dog stand that I go to almost every day in the summer. The owner has a great product, it's tasty, he's very friendly, I've gotten to know him over the years. There have been times when I haven't had cash and he's shown me empathy and just let me pay him back at another time. It is as low-tech as you can get, but he provides as good a customer experience as anyone I know.
Implementing the Tenets Across the Organization
Shaun: Can you share some information about how Reliance, with well over 3,000 team members, can ensure that everybody adheres to these tenets when working with customers?
Arun: That's where the "right call" comes in. We wanted to make it a mantra, something simple and ingrained in the culture of Reliance. We have it on little cards, we have it on a billboard right when you walk off the elevator onto our main floor, it's on every floor, it's projected onto laptops and people's computers as their wallpaper. It was just a way of encapsulating those important facets. We wanted to make it simple - you don't want to have an overwhelming amount of items, you just want to have a few concrete ones that everyone gets and can get behind. And that's really what the "right call" is.
Partnering with Organizations with Similar Values
Shaun: When you're looking to partner with other organizations, do you look for them to have similar values and tenets?
Arun: It's similar to being neighbors. You've got to live with that neighbor for a long time. If they don't have similar values, if they don't want to share a drink with you on a Friday night and be friendly, and also be respectful of your yard and your way of living, then it's never going to work. That's why it's so important that with Reliance, we really do look at the culture of another organization, even if we were doing an RFP.
I think this is why the relationship between KUBRA and Reliance has been so strong for close to two decades now. It's because I think our two organizations always want to do the right thing for the customer. I think you view our customer as your customer. And so, to us, we can't ask for a better partner.
Evolving Customer Preferences
Shaun: As we move forward, customer preferences are obviously constantly evolving. Do you think that there's a possibility that these tenets may evolve with customers' changing needs? What are your thoughts on what may evolve, say in the next three to five years?
Arun: That's why our fifth tenet is "never stop improving." It's really about understanding what is happening in the world when it comes to customer experience and what customers want. Some things like showing empathy and being friendly never change. But we see speed to delivery becoming more important - we're in a world where everything is faster. That's why you have to enable and leverage technology to keep up with that speed of change and the speed of delivery that customers expect.
The other thing that we've really noticed is that people no longer judge you in your silo. You're not judged on customer experience by being the best home comfort or HVAC company compared to your competitors. They're actually comparing us to Apple or Amazon. They're comparing us to their last best customer experience. If they had a great experience that was a 10 out of 10 at Apple, they expect the same from us. So we are not racing against what people used to think when they were competing with regular competitors; you're competing with every other business that's out there. It's a really high bar to uphold, but it's also very motivating because it continues to push you forward.
A Memorable Customer Experience
Shaun: Before I let you go, we ask this question to all of our guests. Can you tell us about a time when you personally had a very memorable good or bad customer experience?
Arun: For bad experiences, I think this says a lot - I can't remember them, which means those companies that gave me that bad experience, they're not memorable. And I think that's a death note for most companies.
But for a good experience, I can talk about an excellent experience with shoes and online shopping. Shoes can be tricky to buy online because they're very fickle in terms of fit. I had been hearing about this great shoe company called TLB Mallorca. It's a gentleman who started his own factory on the Spanish island of Mallorca. He builds shoes that are modeled after shoes that are $8,000, but he sells them for a fraction of the price.
I needed shoes for a wedding a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to order from them. I had been emailing the owner, asking for detailed size charts because shoe sizes can vary between companies. He took the time to answer all of my emails, understood that I had a wedding coming up, and wanted to make sure I had the best experience.
When he delivered the shoes right before the wedding, he didn't send me one pair - he sent me two. I only paid for one, but he sent me the two sizes that I was unsure about. And he threw in a free matching belt. I wrote back thinking it might have been a mistake, but he said, "No, I understand this is a wedding, it's really important for you. So I just wanted to make sure that you had the right size. Send back the other one, and the belt is just for you." I thought, wow, this is somebody that I am going to buy shoes from for the rest of my life. That is excellent customer experience.
Shaun: Wow, that is pretty impressive on so many levels. And I think it's a story, Arun, that we can all relate to. We all need shoes, and so many of us shop online. It can feel at times that the experience can be both very impersonal and quite transactional. So it sounds like you had this experience where you were able to find an organization and customer service that really was above and beyond. And it sounds like they've made in you a customer for life.
Arun: Yeah, and it's the personal nature of the interaction. You hit the nail on the head, Shaun. Online shopping is often very impersonal and transactional. But all of a sudden, Tony, who's the owner, by the way, it was the owner that was writing back to me. It wasn't just somebody out of his call center or some admin person, it was the owner that was working with me. And I formed a personal relationship with him.
I think that's what everybody wants from customer experience - that they're being taken care of. And as I said earlier, it's like they're treating you as if you were their friend, family member, or mom. I think that is the mark of top-notch customer experience.
Conclusion
Shaun: Well, I think these are words that we should all live by. Thank you for such an enlightening day, and what a great example that we can all identify with. Thank you for your time today. And for all of you listening, please make sure you continue to tune into our KUBRA podcast. Thank you for your time.
That's all from Experience Better, the CX podcast. If you like the show, be sure to subscribe, like, and rate us on iTunes, or from wherever you get your podcasts. Please send us your questions to continue the conversation on Twitter, or on LinkedIn at KUBRA.
Thanks, everyone.