Should the Indian consumer forget about good service?

BPO / KPO / “X”PO they are the buzz words of today. This segment has come as a boon to the youth of today. The job market has never looked better and the financial, social, economic, geographical, has permeated from the metros to other big cities and will soon shift to smaller cities.

We are proudly servicing the global customers.

And should we not be proud. After all the neighborhood supposedly “good for nothing” fellow (hold your horses…not my original comment…this is based on the famous Hindi saying – Padoge Likhoge banoge nawab, kelogo kudogo banogo kharab….so all the people who were in bottom half of class are not “generally” considered to have a good future….impact of bottom half and myth of importance of class X & XII marks we will discuss in subsequent articles) – coming back to current topic…..now this fellow who supposedly did not have a future is now speaking English with a twisted tongue and earning 10 grand plus a month! (to begin with)

Great so Employment opportunities are going up! People are earning more, spending more, country is on path of development and self reliance, I should be rejoicing!
Yes I am!.........but……

What about me the Indian Consumer who is also a “big” user of services of Indian Service companies (Lets not convert our spending from INR to USD. Look at absolute numbers – do not want to get into debate on purchasing power parity and conversion issues…again another issue for separate discussion – I too am a big consumer of Banking, Mobile phone, Travel, Insurance,  Tourism and other services for which we are getting an excellent name globally of doing a good job.

Is it only me, who keeps on getting calls from irritating call agents who have no clue how to handle a customer, or break my head trying to explain to customer care agent that I am complaining about a amount in my credit card that I have NEVER spend.

Lemme give you some masterpiece.

Your MOBILE rings, you answer though you do not recognize the number (if you do not answer or cut the phone, rest assured you will have 10 missed calls in space of 2 mins) the voice on the other end says – Sir I am calling from orange and you are an orange customer. (Thank you for enlightenment, I was always under the impression it was apple and by the way what happened to common courtesy of asking whether it is appropriate to talk to me right now, not to mention that the diction, and accent made you think the call was from bihar!)
Me: Yes I am
Perky voice: Sir are you a pre paid or post paid customer?
Me: You are from Orange, I am your customer, should YOU not know what customer type I am?
Perky Voice: That is fine, but please tell
Me: What is fine? I do not know you, why should I divulge any details to you, specifically details that you should be knowing if you are orange
Perky Voice: Sir we have a scheme for you by which if you convert from pre paid to post paid you will get a clock.
Me: Thank you not interested. Do your homework!

Another masterpiece

Call: you see a Chennai number, so answer the phone
Me: Hello Subir here
Another Perky Voice (APV): Sir can I talk to Mr. Subir Agrawal I am calling from Citibank,
Me: Subir
APV: Sir have you used our Internet banking site?
Me: (again courtesy of proper mobile phone etiquettes totally absent) – If you are calling from Citibank, should you not know whether I am using your internet banking site or not
APV: What do you mean
Me: I repeat my statement, in slow motion
APV: Sir that is fine, there is a reward, we are giving a CD of some vague songs if you login to the site before 30 November
Me: As you are obviously totally ignorant of my relationship with your bank, can you please tell me whether I will still get the CD if I have been using your bank website for last 2 years plus if I login.
APV: Sounding slightly lost, makes me repeat what I said. Still is lost, says, Sir scheme is till 30th November, so if you login you will win the cd.

Well I can go on and on……if I narrate the harrowing experiences of calling and talking to customer care agents to resolve a problem, it will require a book (Wow another idea, I should do a khuswant singh, ask people to send their harrowing experiences with customer care executives, compile it and get it published…just like his joke books!)

The issue that concern me are:

1. The service quality is bad. The way they talk, do not understand what you are saying, makes you think whether you are really a “wanted” customer or just another prospect who is quickly forgotten once the immediate objective is met. The refined voice, proper salutation and impeccable manners that was available as late as couple of years back is completely missing.  


2. Have the companies which are supposedly having huge IT teams, budget, latest BI tools, not doing ANY data mining. (Remember these are not isolated incidents and similar things are happening on a very regular basis and I can bet big that you would have experienced the same).


3. Does it not pose a security risk handling such type of calls. I do not know the person calling, I am not gullible (Hope so!), but I am sure if this trend continues, there will be people who will fall for the next line that can come, OK sir even if you do not have internet access or will not be able to access the internet in next three day, if you give me your password I will log you in, and you will win that CD for no work. Even if 1 out of 100 falls for it, the efforts are worth it!! (Have you heard of the famous case where one intelligent soul not only gave his debit card alongwith pin number to a person standing outside ATM for the promise of replacement of photo card for free!! Icing on cake – the fraudster after checking the account said, that the minimum balance needs to be 25K for card to be issued, so please deposit more money into the account, which our gullible fellow does and soon the fool and his money are soon parted…..so do not say it will not happen….gullibility is more common than common sense!)

And why is this happening:

1. Poor service quality: All the able bodied and good resources are handling global calls. Me poor Indian customer is low on priority for good service


2. Pay scales have escalated beyond expectations, so good resources are going for companies which are earning in dollars.


3. Booming job market means people changing jobs for a difference of couple of hundred bucks a month. Not to mention HR & Business Managers telling candidates, forget the notice period, I do not need your relieving letter, I will pay your difference in settlement, join from today. (conveniently forgetting that the shoe will be on other foot tomorrow and pinch them too)


4. Data mining and targeted communication (refer to the first article and flash link in the same…offline V/s online)…forget it, Indian companies are nowhere near what is globally best. All the BI tools are more of white elephants and I have yet to experience real power of the same “USED APPROPRIATELY” by any Indian company. We are still in the mode that cost of calling all customers for same service is cheaper than doing a proper targeted marketing. Business Managers are still satisfied with conversion ratios is low single digits percentage point. They still accept the fact that even is one customer in 500 converts it is fine. Hello wake up and smell the coffee, your manpower cost has gone up, competition has intensified, customer is more discerning and will appreciate a more personalized service. Guess till all are blind no risk. (for the sake of customers, I am keeping fingers crossed for the one eyed to come and rule!)


5. Security – who cares. Customer has a problem, let him call the customer care agent, I am sure with our excellent waiting process he will be so thankful once he gets to our executive that  he will forget his original complaint. After all we have stated in our very first communication, do not share your password with anyone. If now they do it or are conned their bad luck. We have taken all legal measures to ensure we are not risk!!

So what are the hopes for the Indian customers? Will we be treated as second class customers? Or should be hope for a weaker country to catch the BPO bug so that Indian companies outsource their Indian customer servicing to these cheaper countries! Then I am sure we will get better service as we are currently servicing others?

Now that’s a thought and business idea!

P.S.: Chetan Bhagat’s One night @ call centre is pretty decent and is highlighting other issues – of people working in call centres. So all is not goody goody there too!

Chicken or egg?

First day into the job and I stare at a blank screen? What happened to all the ideas, the issues and events that I wanted to write about? Suddenly they do not seem worth commenting upon. Or am I caught by the “marketing / sales” bug?

Is the pressure of the thought whether what I am saying is worth anybody’s time to even read in full, forget commenting on it? (No comments on the first article make me think - even my loyal friends, with whom I took the liberty of sending a spam mail, do not find it worth to comment upon! OK there was ONE comment but guess it was a SPAM comment by some geek who had written a niffy program which went on giving same comment to all blogs to promote their services – will comment on these evils later)

So is this a classic case of product being bad or marketing being bad? Was my mail – communication statement not exciting enough for people to go and read? Or did my segmentation go awry? Was it too low (or too high – I wish!) for the consumer to comment upon and they just did not feel it important enough.

Well there were the early adopters – the geeks or should I call them – the ones who will do anything and everything once – who responded back and said that they visited the page, couple of them said yes they will go back again!!!(Humoring me?), some said they will read it later, just glanced at it (they glanced but not excited enough to read more….was my packaging not appealing or the template design fell short on usability factors? Others kept a dignified silence – did not want to hurt my feelings?

So what should I do? Change the packaging, change the marketing statement, the branding, or should I change the product?

My salesman cap will say product is bad, marketing s$%^&ks (want to make this a family blog!).
My boss cap says if all was fine then why do I need sales and marketing team, people will stand outside in line and buy. So forget the excuses and sell.
The CEO cap (now I am hallucinating) will call the meetings of all dignitaries and conduct a finger pointing session:
Production in-charge:- do not dare blame the product it is perfectly as per specifications and I did not give those – they were by the R&D & Product development team.

R&D/PD:- this is what the market told us they wanted.

Boss / CEO:- did they write to you they wanted?

R&D:-.. Well ahem…......not exactly

Boss:-So did you do a market research and talk to cross section of people, identified their needs, do a factoring analysis (do not ask me what it means – some term in market research – bless my MR proff) to arrive at required set of features and functionalities in the product?

R&D/PD:-…um….umm........well not in so many words, but something very scientific and similar. Not this but something similar....

Boss: elaborate.

R&D/PD:- Well you see everyone was doing it, the competition, the non competition and all of them were claiming that they were doing very well. Infact one of our competitor even won the best award in a competition

Boss: …which one….

R&D/PD:-I think it was some Jhumree Talaya Award. The bottomline was that if we did not come out with the product soon enough we will lose all the market share to our competition! (rushing into it as they now see the kill) But do not think we did a rush job, we did a brain storming session (the offsite bill for the same can be reviewed for confirmation), had a series of meeting internally, did extensive research and prepared the functionality matrix (flushing out a colored excel printout) and then we came out with a product that had all the functionalities of our competitors and then some more. I think marketing did not do their job well.

Marketing: Do not pass the buck to us. We have used the most appealing colors as per our corporate policy. Look at the gloss, look at the branding. Look at the punchline, there is no way it cannot succeed.

Boss: well it has not yet shown any sign of crawling, let alone success.

Marketing: we need a bigger advertising splash. It needs to register in the sub consciousness of the conscious mind of the unknowing targeted customer segment with the other set of similar product in his sub conscious so that he gets the urge to buy the product whenever he thinks about the product. Once that is done we will have to trigger the sub conscious mind to tell the conscious mind that the customer has to go to the nearest super market and buy out product.

Boss: I am lost.

[Finance (in the background): And no talks of more budgets, you have already wasted the yearly budget and have nothing to show for it.]

Marketing: Exactly the customer will also be lost in the struggle between the conscious and sub conscious till they become unconscious and then we will charge the product to their card and make them believe that they have already bought it and have a huge need for the product. And to make then unconscious and go for this unwanted stuff our sales team has to think and act smart. They have to think out of the box, paint outside the boundaries, fire the latent needs of the customer, Destroy the competition, Count the chickens before they hatch and it will be a big success!)

Sales: Market has no need for the product

Marketing: If competition can sell, are you sissies that you cannot sell! It is this defeatist attitude which is making you not give your 100% when you are pitching to the customer. Self belief will make believe your customer. Go ahead fearless and kill the competition. Remember the charge of the light brigade – theirs is not to question why, theirs is just to do and die…I mean sell

Boss: Yes this was an excellent poem and NO we cannot let the competition rule. I want you to buckle your belts, time for men to be separated from the boys, go and sell. I do not want to hear excuses, I want higher revenue. You all iron out amongst yourselves what you want to do, I want my numbers!!!

……oops did I get carried away. does it make sense?

Guess the orders are there…go and sell. Selling or marketing, product or research, need or want, chicken or egg….let us not get into all this…need of the hour is to sell…so go and sell.

Afterall if you are hungry whether you will get into a debate about chicken or egg or will you break the egg to make the omlete!

Ahem I feel satiated

Online V/s Offline publishing

Blogs, blogs, blogs, I am sure everybody who has access to computer and internet today has heard of this phenomenon and how it is going to change the global publishing industry.
Having been associated with the Internet industry for last 6 years, it was high-time that I put in my two bit on this interesting revolution.

What made me finally take the plunge...well I would say a lot had to do with this presentation my friend Biplove forwarded to me and asked my comments on it.

A slick presentation it talks of publishing industries status in year 2014. Loads of what it says makes sense, & then it goes into the realm of predicting (my analysis) technological developments - still easy to foresee in near future and more interestingly it talks of customer adoption of new technology and between the lines means profits, returns on investment and changes in human behaviour.

Have a look at the link, http://www.lightover.com/epic/ols-master.swf, pump up the volume and give your comments on the same.

My comments -
technical feasible.
customer adaptation - have my reservations - specially in mass appeal category. Yep people will be there who will use and swear by it. But will it completely change the face of industry as predicted I will like to get some more data.

The questions that rise in my mind are...
a) will online reading become so BIG that it will change the offline reading habits?
b) What h/w advancements will happen that will make online reading as pleasurable as offline reading (change my morning habit of reading online rather than going thru the various newspapers sitting on the throne?)
c) will online reading graduate from search, retrieve and refer more to reading as a habit?
d) what in fact will be shape of reading itself given the popularity of television, toon channels, kid channels that have made kids indulge more in watching than reading!!
e) how does all translate to Indian scenario? Will we go a step further?

what say??