Big fish need special pampering

Jonminofri Nazir, Contributor, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Would you like to be treated like a king by Telkomsel and be given a wide range of facilities for free? You could even have your number not appear on the receiver's cellular screen.

A customer service staff member will also be made available to cater to all your requirements and handle any complaints about your phone. The staff member is easy to contact through your cellular, because he or she is made specially available to service special customers. In addition, if your payment is late, you will not be treated as harshly as ordinary customers, whose phones are normally cut off.

All these facilities are automatically yours to enjoy the moment you reach special status. But if you are an ordinary subscriber, you can also get similar facilities just by frequently using your post-paid kartuHalo card issued by Telkomsel. And when your bills reach Rp 1 million per month, within three months you will be included in the VIP category by the operator.

"That's one of our ways of retaining subscribers," said Woeryanto Soeradji, the commercial director of Telkomsel.

Users of prepaid cards, for whatever amount they spend, do not receive extra facilities. The reason is simple: the GSM operator does not have the personal data of prepaid card users.

Woeryanto said that in fact all operators give special treatment to their major customers, however, the facilities provided differ from operator to operator.

For example, Excelcom's major customers receive a special magazine and special facilities at Soekarno-Hatta Airport.

Other companies have different ways of treating these "big- fish" customers.

Blue Bird, a 30-year-old taxi company, takes care of its loyal customers in its own unique way.

"We pamper our customers at unexpected times. We call it 'Surprise the customer'," said Noni S. A. Poernomo, the business development director of the company. It means that the management gives customers something they cannot predict in advance, making it more emotional than receiving extra benefits that are clearly stated.

Out of the few major customers, Blue Bird prioritizes about 10 who can get almost anything they request. For instance, Jakarta International School (JIS) always insists on clean buses, pitch black tires, specially designed seats and thick windows. They also insist that the windows do not break into sharp shards, therefore every three months the windows of the buses are tested at JIS by throwing stones at them. The drivers are also required to be not only skillful in driving, but capable of managing an accident and providing first aid.

In short, Blue Bird meets every demand.

In the eyes of Blue Bird management all these requests are reasonable, because the contracts are for a four-year period, which is technically equal to the depreciation value of the buses. Hence, Blue Bird provides fully dedicated buses for this type of customer and there are no less than 400 buses contracted out on this basis.

Not included with the big fish are other loyal customers, who also enjoy other privileges, such as paying on credit. The precondition for this special treatment is that the customer has used Blue Bird metered taxis with fares totaling at least Rp 1 million a month. He or she is then given a pad of 25 credit vouchers, which looks like a checkbook. The customer only has to fill in the amount of the fare on a slip and then hands it over to the driver every time he or she uses a Blue Bird taxi. The passenger is then billed at the end of the month.

Once a customer uses up three pads of credit vouchers, he is entitled to a free voucher to stay at a hotel on Lombok. And after continually using vouchers for six months, the management still has more surprise gifts to offer. It seems that Blue Bird management believes in the element of surprise when pleasing its priority customers.

In this way Blue Bird has netted some 400 voucher users, most of them corporations. A bank, for example, gives vouchers to its employees working overtime. Other users are foreign companies, mostly oil companies.

These vouchers have contributed 10 percent to Blue Bird's revenue.

For many businesses, priority customers are small in number, but big in contribution. If these big-fish customers were to jump into another pond, it would naturally result in negative repercussions on the company's finances.

Telkomsel's VIP subscribers, for instance, are only 5 percent of the 800,000 holders of kartuHalo, but their contribution can amount to as much as 22 percent to that of the total postpaid subscribers.

In the banking industry the number is more fantastic. At one of the largest private banks in Indonesia, 20 percent of the customers have deposited 80 percent of the bank's total funds, hence the other 80 percent of its customers own only 20 percent of the money in the bank. This means that even if half of the bank's customers withdrew their funds, theoretically at least, the bank's performance would not be badly influenced, as long as the big-fish customers stay on.

However, each type of business has a different level of difficulty in deciding their priority customers and how to maintain them.

The first problem is the database.

For Telkomsel this does not pose as a major problem, as the database of its postpaid customers are automatically kept in computers. But the data is very general, as it is selected based on the amount of usage. Thus, it is difficult for Telkomsel to formulate the right approach for its priority customers. The data does not classify customers by profession, sex, age, hobby and so forth. If they were able to categorize data by a more specific criteria, it would be easier to maintain customers so that they would not replace their cards with ones from the competitor.

The bank's data operates in the same way. The wealthy customers it maintains are so varied, with different lifestyles and different characters. As banks do not have any specific lifestyle data, it becomes difficult to group the customers under one classification and provide privileged facilities that would suit everyone's taste.

One can imagine the hugely different lifestyles between two billionaires. One customer, with Rp 3 billion in the bank, might be a Glodok trader, who wears shorts and drives an old Kijang, while another with the same amount could be the wife of a high- ranking official, who is fond of shopping and has a luxury car.

The approach to the two opposing types of customers must clearly be different. Here lies the difficulty for the bank in pampering their big-fish customers.

Blue Bird could be one of the companies with the most customers in their database. They have currently on their computers 800,000 phone numbers along with the names of customers who have called them for their services. This number represents approximately 10 percent of the total phone numbers published by PT Telkom.

Based on this data, Blue Bird selects its priority customers and offers them its special programs and facilities.

Outside the 800,000 regulars, there might be millions of other unregistered customers who stop Blue Bird taxis on the streets.

Because of this deterring factor, many companies provide general facilities for their major customers. Nothing personal. The most they can give is a price discount and a card from Telkomsel to wish you a happy birthday.