The Bengal Chamber presented another THINK Session on 23rd June 2016, in association with The Telegraph, with Mr. Biji K Kurien, Former Chief Executive – Berger Paints & Former President of The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry talking on “People: The Key To Successful Business”.

Biji K. Kurien, a Gold Medalist in the Post Graduate Programme in Business Administration from IIM Ahmedabad, graduated with honours in Electrical Engineering from Sir M. Visveswariah College of Engineering Bangalore, and is a veritable storehouse of experience and knowledge in industry, business and management. His interests include Public Speaking and Management Teaching.

Mr. Kurien started off the session by mentioning that the business magazines and newspapers generally attribute ‘Technology’, ‘Fund Raising’, ‘Cash Flow’, ‘Scaling up of Operations’ & tend to avoid ‘People’ as a key to Successful Businesses. He laid stress on the word ‘People’ as he feels that we must all realize that ‘People’ or ‘Employees’ are the key to successful business. He explained his statement with a classic example of ‘Calling a Customer Care’ helpline & the experience that a customer gathers through this process & how the brand gets affected if the customer is not satisfied with the response.

Merely satisfying customers is not enough but the organization has to constantly add to customers’ delight & that is ensured by the employees / people & therefore the employees or ‘People’ are the key to any business. He believes that Happy & Motivated Employees generate delighted customers & delighted customers are the backbone of successful businesses. Employees’ self-interest must be aligned to the company’s objective of business generation; only then it’s a Win-Win situation.

He cited instances of how good & bad customer experiences affect the goodwill of the company / brand. He talked about the importance of employer empowerment. He added that, back offices are fully responsible to adhere to the promises made by the Sales Officers & to ensure that both the departments need to work in sync with each other as otherwise Customer Service suffers and the company’s objective is not fulfilled. Customer Service Departments should not work in silos.

He summarized the session and said that an employee’s self-interest must match with the organization’s interest in order to delight the customer and that the employees need to be properly empowered at every level so that they are able to take action to please the customer without any delay.