Success Quote by Sanjay Kumar

There’s a quietly radical move in Sanjay Kumar’s line: he treats “customer service” not as a moral performance, but as a diagnostic instrument. The “very critical phase” he points to isn’t the cheery front-end of greetings and scripts; it’s the moment a company stops assuming what customers value and starts measuring it in the only currency that counts - behavior, friction, and churn.

The intent is managerial and pragmatic: identify which parts of service actually earn loyalty (speed, clarity, ownership) versus which parts simply burn time while irritating people (hand-offs, canned empathy, opaque policies). The subtext is sharper: a lot of what businesses call “service” is theater. Customers don’t want to be “delighted” by a smiley template; they want their problem solved without being made to feel like a case number. Kumar’s language draws a line between value creation and annoyance, implying that organizations often overinvest in the wrong half because it’s easier to standardize niceness than to fix systemic causes.

Context matters here. In an era of chatbots, outsourced call centers, and metrics that reward closing tickets over resolving issues, companies risk confusing internal efficiency with customer relief. Kumar is arguing for a pivot from performative helpfulness to forensic listening: map the irritants, cut them out, and double down on the moments that feel like respect. The phrase “really understand” is the tell - he’s talking about humility as a business strategy, where the customer’s irritation becomes data and, ideally, leverage.