Amlesh Ratnaparkhi is a successful entrepreneur with business interests in IT Consulting, Call Centre Services for Banks, Custom Software Development and Hospitality industry. My Association with Amlesh goes back to the year 2007 while he was working with Oracle Corporation. After a series of very successful assignments with prominent MNCs he launched his own venture. Since we adhere and swear by a common set of values, there is a lot we share in terms of vision and philosophy. It seemed only natural to come together once again.
In the year 2020, we launched our consulting firm. In him I see a kindred spirit and interviewing him looked like a very interesting and insightful proposition. I knew it would be easy for me to relate to know better what he believed in.
He was gracious enough to oblige.
Me: Hi Amlesh
Amlesh: Hi Deepak
Me: It’s been a while since we had one of those conversations in which we used to speak our minds out at length, about things of our mutual interests.
Amlesh: Yeah, it’s been quite a while. I am looking forward to it, so shoot.
Me: Ok, so here goes. Tell me what made you change your focus from a successful 9 to 5 job to taking a plunge and becoming an entrepreneur.
Amlesh: Well to start with, you know it well that none of my assignments were ever 9 to 5 kind of jobs. Being in sales, there were never any fixed office timings, not that I am complaining. It’s like being the James Bond…Am always on duty! But sales as you know is an exciting career choice. I had the good fortune of working with the best teams. In the course of my career, I developed several skills associated with sales, amongst these, relationship building is one that I value the most. And that is with a good reason. This one skill encouraged me and gave me confidence to seriously think about taking a plunge. It has helped me to build trust with clients and develop long term mutually enriching relationships. These relations also opened door of new opportunities for us through references and word of mouth recommendations. Many of my clients are also my business associates in certain ventures.
Me: So, what you are saying is that relationship building is an important skill if one is thinking of becoming an entrepreneur?
Amlesh: Yes, most certainly so. See, the existence of our businesses depends upon solving problems and creating value for our clients. But to reach to that stage where a prospective client begins to believe in you, you need to build trust. Building a relationship is all about trust and respect. You need to deliver at every stage for building trust. Let me elaborate. Every interaction that you have with your prospective customer should deliver some value to him or her. It can be some information a valuable input or just being consistent in keeping your word and showing up every time, as committed. Most of the customers are so used to being let down in terms of quality of product/ service, behaviour and conduct that it only takes some discipline and commitment of consistent ethical conduct to make a difference to become a dependable and trustworthy business associate.
Me: Sounds logical. What else beyond building the relationship is most important?
Amlesh: Knowing you job well, delivering what you promised and consistently delivering more than the customer’s expectation are some of the other very important aspects for having a long relationship with your customers that creates high customer lifetime value.
Me: But you get to demonstrate your skills about knowing your job only after you get an opportunity to do so. How do you establish the faith in you, so that you get an opportunity to demonstrate it?
Amlesh: That is very much part of the relationship building exercise, where you build the trust. You will have to constantly prove yourself not just as an empath but also an knowledgeable person in your chosen field of business. Here your past experience, and social proof of your expertise will come in handy. You will have to avail every opportunity to establish your sincerity, and credibility to build trust. We always try to share something of value to the customer in all our interactions. We also try to establish our understanding of the client’s business and its inherent challenges.
Me: Ok, how do you ensure that your team delivers what was promised to the customer? Because the communication gaps between the sales and delivery team are quite common and are often the cause of fire-fighting situations. This is most evident in the interactions between the support services team and the customer.
Amlesh: We are very particular and committed to following structured processes. As an organisation culture we have zero tolerance for circumvention of laid down procedures. Building and adopting a system in the organisation is a challenging and effort intensive task but we realised very early in our journey that ignoring it would land us in deeper troubles and very dissatisfied customers once the organisation and volume of its transactions grow. It is also very difficult to change people’s ways when they become used to working in a certain way. We have developed very robust processes and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for our teams to mitigate the risk of communication gaps and failures. Here my exposure to best practices during my stint with MNCs came in quite handy. All our teams have a standard practice of documenting all client interactions. These documentations mostly happen in our CRM system, but at the very least you can certainly find a client related record stored in standard word or excel document templates, in the common repository of client related data. This is not only a convenient way to communicate but also saves time and effort which would otherwise be wasted in gathering information or acting in absence of clear information, only to increase customer’s distress.
Me: That makes a lot of sense. But what exactly do you mean when you say “consistently delivering more than the customer’s expectations”? You do need to right size expectations and draw a line somewhere.
Amlesh: See under committing and overdelivering is what is meant by that. Unfortunately, sales people are always seen as ones who overcommit and then they under deliver, this is exactly what kills trust. When you are in the service industry, your basic obligation is to deliver what is committed. However, since my service is the outcome of my skill and knowledge I do not hesitate to go an extra mile although it is not obligatory on my part. I never hesitate to deliver something extra which I know does not cost me any loss of opportunity or require any special cost in terms of effort, time or money, but it will deliver real value to my customers. I never think twice before doing that for my customers. That probably is one of the special ingredients for building lasting relationships, that we have been able to build and which resulted in repeat business, strong recommendations and lasting trust.
Me: But doesn’t this policy of extra service, lead to unrealistic expectations from your delivery team? Specially since scope creep is something that a software project delivery team has to encounter quite frequently.
Amlesh: Generally, it does not happen because as I said we have a very structured approach to all our activities; the terms and conditions of our contract with our customers are absolutely transparent, it clearly spells out what is within the scope of work and what isn’t. Since in most of the cases we collaborate with the client in defining the scope of work, there remains very little ambiguity in this matter. Since the terms and conditions of the contract are fair, we have always found that the request from the customer end have always been within reasonable limits. At the organisations level we have always found a way to agree on a win-win situation. Once again, the element of trust that we enjoy with our customers has always played an important role in reaching an agreement.
Me: What is your vision for us as a team and how do you see us realise it?
Amlesh: I want to see us consistently strive and improve our collective abilities to understand customers’ circumstances, point-of-views, and expectations and act upon them to deliver practical solutions. As you know our overseas operations are gathering steam but for at least the coming 5 years, our focus will primarily remain trained on domestic audience. Given the opportunities presented by emerging technologies, I foresee immense opportunities for businesses to harvest the power of technology and strive towards acquiring market leadership in several business verticals. My personal vision is to actively contribute through our skills and assist at least 100 businesses to attain high growth and market leadership positions, in the coming 10 years. We are a young nation our youth population should be groomed and guided by their leaders to move towards an efficient and sustainable tomorrow.
Me: Well Amlesh, as always its difficult to end our discussion, since the vision, beliefs and innovative ideas resonate with me perfectly. But as we are running out of time we will have to shift discussing other topics that I had listed for today’s interview to another day and time. Thank you so much once again, like always, it was a pleasure speaking with you.
Amlesh: Thanks Deepak, same here.