Cleartrip and Nurturing Relationships

Over the past few weeks, I have been spending time with one of the companies that my company Mahindra has invested in – the travel portal Cleartrip. We are focusing on how we can engage with our employees and customers in a much more compelling manner – excellence is now par for the course for most product and service organizations. How does one move beyond excellence and create “nurturing relationships” at Cleartrip – so that the company can gain loyalty beyond reason from all its constituents and become what Kevin Roberts has called a “lovemark”? There are several ways that we’re going about it at Cleartrip – and not all of the nurturing is directly related to profit, but this is not the space to discuss that. What I want to share is a story. This is about a customer evangelist for Cleartrip. He was of course delighted that Cleartrip gave him excellent service when he had a problem. But what converted him from a merely happy (well served) customer into an evangelist was the fact that one of the group’s founders (Hrush, who also blogs regularly on the Cleartrip blog) nurtured him when he wanted to share his views about web design and simplicity. Now, it just so happens that this customer really knows his stuff (and he’s also very funny, he’s designed a whole presentation on how to piss off customers with bad design – a template for what not to do!). Cleartrip has already published his posts a guest blogger on their site and plan on using him to bounce off any new design changes they make. He in turn, never loses an opportunity to talk about Cleartrip’s refreshing approach at every forum he can. Such kind of intensity – let’s call it love - never comes out of marketing exercises. It comes out of a genuine belief that one’s work is important and every engagement is a chance to transform the lives of others, and in the bargain, one’s own life. In the context of the this particular corporation, I would think that value = profit + nurturing where nurturing = meaningfulness + positive transformation.