Infosys SVP identifies "customer delight" as a key result. In other news: It appears I'm the only one who's bothered by this.

Earlier this week, I wondered what evidence Wells Fargo uses to measure success at achieving customer "surprise and delight". Today I attended a webinar on building a talent pipeline: The speaker is a Senior VP of Infosys (and head of the Infosys Leadership Institute). As he highlighted the company's explosive growth (darned impressive), and reviewed their organizational drivers, he listed a handful of desired "Results", which included customer delight (see his PowerPoint slide below).

What's going on? I thought in this era of evidence-based performance management that sophisticated companies had stopped using such fluffy phrases. Evidently not. (Maybe I'm the only one who's bothered by this... so I'll stop now.)

Comments

[Some one]

It was quite an interesting reading. There are many other companies that have a better runrate than Infosys.

Customer delight no doubt is a driver but there is currently no direct corelation to their growth. Other major market drivers are at play that is forcing them to talk that language.

Maybe, you should post another post after one year. Also, are you a customer or have you spoken to one yet?

[Meera Srinivasan]

I am not sure how much revenue growth can be perceivd as a reflection of customer delight / satisfaction. Its one thing to get the deal and quite another to delight a customer. Again in an IT scenario, its not enough to just delight your corporate clients, the end customer has to benefit. I would say that end customer delight is what really matters. I for one feel for customer service, I dont like to attach revenue growth as the benefit of this. Its for plain satisfaction on my part. I dont care a damn whether I made money or not. But I am still answerable to my boss. So, i work my head off to finetune my 'delight' design so that I can show some benefit for the logical thinkers. I maintain that custome delight is like wanting to be a good parent or a good child, just for the plain satisfaction of it, not to derive any material benefit. If the benefits accrue, ok, if not also it should be ok. So any business concern talking about customer delight is really borne out of their need to present a bold face to their shareholders, i dont think its always to do with the passion to serve. Here I am making a general comment and not anything about infosys.