Chief Operating Officer / India
What changed when the service was made explicit
Decisions & consequences
01Giving the household a say in what arrives first
In 2022 we spoke with sixty selected households after completed moves. Twenty-two described difficulty finding things needed soon after arrival, even though the consignment had been delivered. The conversations were not a representative satisfaction survey. They gave us a concrete service question that our transport record did not answer. A customer could acknowledge receipt of every carton and still spend the evening searching for ordinary essentials among them.
A regional head wanted to leave the matter with customer packing instructions. He argued that changing the delivery sequence would add coordination to an already demanding day. Farida and I thought the company needed to examine its own contribution, because our crews packed many of the cartons and our arrangements influenced their sequence. We developed a pilot in which households identified a limited set of priority cartons before packing. Handling owners determined what was feasible;the designation did not override restrictions on items or safe loading. Personal items needed during travel remained a separate customer discussion.
Forty-five different households participated. Thirty-eight received their priority cartons in the agreed first delivery sequence and seven did not. We approved₹18 lakh in annual service expense for coordination and handling, retaining the seven exceptions for examination. The original sixty conversations and this later group were different exercises. I did not turn their figures into a before-and-after improvement percentage or imply that the pilot proved satisfaction across the whole service.
The decision added work that a delivery-only account could regard as unnecessary. It also created a promise we had to assess honestly. The company needed to explain an exception promptly and understand whether the difficulty arose in planning, packing or delivery. My role was to give that work an owner and a budget, not ask the crew to compensate through unplanned effort at the end of a long assignment. I would bring the handling and destination teams into the first design conversation earlier next time. A useful service begins with the customer's task, but it becomes credible only when the people expected to deliver it can explain how it will work.
Separating storage from a promise of selective access
Customers using temporary storage sometimes asked for one carton while the rest of their goods remained in the depot. Our inventory could identify the consignment, yet the storage arrangement had been organised primarily for complete return. Finding the record was therefore easier than retrieving the selected item. In 2023 I proposed a defined selective-access service rather than allow every such request to become an informal exception with an improvised date.
The depot manager preferred to preserve dense storage and quote each retrieval individually. The commercial team wanted to describe easy access as a general benefit. Both positions had a reasonable concern:space was costly, and customers valued flexibility. Neither by itself explained the operating configuration needed to provide that flexibility. We worked with qualified depot owners on a separate arrangement for customers whose expected access needs justified it. The terms described notice, coordination and the work included. We did not promise immediate access to every stored item or publish handling instructions as if one method suited every consignment.
The programme required₹24 lakh of initial expense and₹12 lakh additional annual operating provision. In a selected review of twenty-four retrieval requests, eighteen were met on the agreed day and six later. The late requests remained exceptions, with the customer account and next arrangement kept open. This was a small service review, not evidence that every future request would meet its date. We also kept the initial programme cost separate from the recurring provision rather than describe them as one annual amount.
The trade-off was a more expensive and less interchangeable storage offering. Some households did not need selective access and had no reason to purchase that configuration. Others could make a better decision once the practical difference was explained. I would now insist that an access claim be reviewed together with the physical arrangement and expected workload before it enters sales language. The inventory establishes accountability for what we hold. The service design must separately establish what we can do when its owner asks for part of it back.
Replacing a convenient unpacking label with an agreed arrival scope
I had supported a broad unpacking description in our standard service conversation. It made quotations shorter and seemed familiar enough to need little explanation. An eighty-move review in 2024 found thirteen cases in which the household expected furniture reassembly that the operating plan did not include. The remaining sixty-seven did not show that particular mismatch. The issue was not whether the word could be defended internally;it was whether our agreement and resources matched the customer's reasonable understanding of the work.
The commercial lead wanted to add a general exclusion to future quotations and leave current cases to branch discretion. I agreed that future language needed correction, but the existing thirteen households required a supported decision. Farida brought service and operating colleagues together with the relevant contract and technical owners. We distinguished carton opening, placement, packing-material removal and any furniture work. Qualified people determined what could be undertaken and by whom. Crews were not asked to improvise assembly outside their competence merely to avoid a difficult conversation.
Ten households accepted revised company-supported arrangements and three chose their own providers. The company spent₹6.4 lakh on the correction. Those choices resolved the scope arrangements in the reviewed set;they were not a satisfaction score or evidence of the final quality of every assembly task. We retained the actual agreement for each household and made the future service description more explicit. I acknowledged that the earlier simplification had been a management choice, not an error invented by the delivery teams.
The revised quotation took longer to discuss. It also made some proposals look less comprehensive until the additional work was properly considered. That was a real commercial consequence, and I preferred it to allowing an uncosted expectation to reach the customer's doorway. My next step would be to test a service description with the people who buy and deliver it before treating familiar vocabulary as shared understanding. Operations can simplify a process, but it should not achieve simplicity by leaving the most consequential distinction for somebody else to discover.
Releasing accepted partner charges while a specific dispute continued
A 2025 operating review found fourteen partner invoices totalling₹42 lakh on hold. The disputed charges amounted to₹2.8 lakh, but the administrative hold applied to the entire group. The service partners had performed work that our records otherwise accepted. I wanted finance and contract owners to examine the scope of the hold rather than let one unresolved question determine the treatment of every rupee on the affected documents.
A regional manager preferred to retain the full hold until the disputed items were settled. He believed it kept attention on the response we needed and avoided the effort of separating the account. Finance required clear supporting records before releasing anything. I agreed with that evidential requirement and asked operating colleagues to identify the accepted work, the particular objection and the owner of the remaining decision. The company did not need to concede the disputed charges in order to distinguish them from amounts it already recognised as payable.
Following review under the actual agreements and applicable requirements, finance released₹39.2 lakh and continued examining₹2.8 lakh. This profile does not prescribe a legal payment deadline or imply that a standard contract term applies to every supplier. The supported outcome was a narrower, documented dispute and payment of the accepted liability. The release was not a cost saving, and the remaining balance was not labelled invalid simply because it was questioned. Qualified owners retained the responsibility to decide it.
The change removed a source of informal negotiating pressure. It also required more careful work than holding the whole account. I regarded that as part of being a dependable operating counterparty. Our service depended on partners being willing and able to accept future assignments, and the company's own records should explain what it had paid or withheld. I would bring this distinction into routine exception reviews rather than wait for a partner relationship to deteriorate. An unresolved charge deserves scrutiny;it should not automatically turn accepted work elsewhere on the invoice into a bargaining instrument.