If there are two things a Puneite swears by without a blink of the eye, it’s Chitale milk and Chitale Bhakarwadi! Sanjay Sayani chats up with Girish Chitale, partner at B G Chitale, now a multi-crore group, at its hi-tech dairy at Bhilawadi in Sangli district.
How does it feel to be one of Maharashtra’s milkmen?
It’s an honour, it’s pride and with both these it’s a tremendous responsibility?
Why responsibility?
To ensure that the trust and belief in the brand is never shaken.
Do Amul and other milk companies offer competition and keep you on your toes?
For me, they are not the competition. My real competition, which keeps me on my toes every moment, is the aspiration of my customers, and the unbelievable trust they have in my product.
Can you give us an example?
We have a back-end system that keeps track of every phone call, every letter, every post card, and every email that we receive, and all of them are answered and then followed up. For instance, every time, we get a complaint about milk having gone bad, we may get sentences that describe it in detail, like it curdled up, or the fat content was slightly low, etc, but in all communications, be it an email, or a call, or a handwritten note, there is a line at the end that says, “ You must find out where it happened, because it can’t happen at your end!” Now that is customer satisfaction and trust, and that is my biggest competition.
How do you address complaints?
We ensure that we find out the entire chain, and we have tracking mechanisms in place, right from the time raw milk comes in to our plant to the time it reaches your home! So we can even pinpoint areas in Pune, and seasons, and then reasons why the milk is the way it is. Now we are going to take customer care to a whole new level.
How?
Right now we have huge machines that can tell us about every ingredient in the milk, which is tested not once, but several times a day. We are in the process of acquiring a hand held detector and systems wherein we will be able to reach to a customer’s home and check the milk there! This will take sometime, but when we implement it, we will derive more satisfaction from it than our customers, be rest assured about that!
How many litres of milk do you sell in Pune per day, and how much of Bhakarwadi?
(Smiles) We sell 3.75 lakh litres of milk per day! As for Bhakarwadi it is three tonnes a day!
What is the future?
We are probably the only group in the world in the food business, who didn’t want people hanging around in our stores! That is the reason why more than twenty years ago we had RFID tags. We knew that 80 per cent of our customers came in an autorickshaw and knew what they wanted. They wanted to be out in a jiffy, so we arranged it in such a way that they could do that! This allowed the 20 per cent of first time or uncertain shoppers to move around freely in the shop! Watch out for what comes next, it’s going to be revolutionary and, yes, the best, because Chitale Bandhu never settles for the No 2 slot!
Photo Courtesy : Pramod Khairnar
- Chitale Bandhu never settles for the No 2 slot - May 23, 2016
