Business 101: How Srinivas Kamath's gamble on customer service helped Natural Ice Cream grow six-fold

By Shannon Tellis

Happy customers equal happy profits may seem like Business 101, but Natural Ice Cream director Srinivas Kamath found it a tough lesson to teach when he first joined the family business in 2009.

At the time, the company was largely manufacturing driven and customer service wasn’t a top priority across their franchise outlets.



Anticipating that some of the older employees might be hesitant to change, Kamath opened a separate entity under the parent company to showcase what better customer service could do. He hired fresh talent from McDonald’s and other fast food chains to model their best service practices and intentionally kept the entities separate so that the employees didn’t feel threatened.

His gamble soon paid off, Kamath told a business magazine recently. The new outlet began raking in double the average daily revenue of the other outlets, just by better attentiveness to customers. That simple shift spawned a collaborative, customer-driven culture that pushed the company from Rs 30 crore in 2009 to Rs 195 crore today.