Customer Service

In India, we have helplines for just about everything. Namashkar, mera naam .... hai, mein aaj aapki kaise sahayata kar sakta(i) hoon? My name is .... how may I help you today? Friendly, pleasant and polite enough. And that's where it ends. Before it even began! I am exhausted by the sheer amount of time and energy (not to mention, money) wasted in dealing with this first line of customer service executives who mean well but are able to help very little in real, substantive terms. Picture this: Me "I'd like some help please in locating my credit card, the courier company says they're unable to deliver it because of an incorrect address provided by you. I don't know the card number since its a new card. Could you trace it by the name of card holder?” Him "Sure, ma'am, what is the CC number? I need the number to proceed" Needless to say, its a fairly pointless dialogue and unless escalated to the level of the supervisor, a lost cause. And its not just credit card companies - this happens with mobile phone service providers, cable guys, public utilities, private banks and so on. The unwillingness, probably stemming from a deficiency in capacity, to grasp a customer's problem and instead rattle off a series of verification questions or worse still so-called problem-solving techniques which are in no way related to your query is incredibly frustrating and unproductive.

For the past 5 days now, I have been trying to get Tata Sky to repair what I think is a minor glitch with the recording function of my TiVo box. After all, how serious can it be if I understand the issue without any training whatsoever in the field of digital transmission and storage of content over satellite? (SK, you will be proud :-)) Service engineers have waltzed in and out of our apartment, set-top boxes have been changed, wires have been ripped out and furious exchanges with team leads at the other end of a phone line have followed, all to no avail. Why not? Because, we as Indians, do not analyse the problem. This is not taught to us in school. What we are taught instead is to memorize solutions (seriously!), blurt them all out and hope that one of them will be the correct answer. Sadly, not.

Since liberalization in 1991/92, we have been promoting our economy as services-oriented, a haven for outsourcing with a focus on large pools of a cheap, English-speaking labour force. To make this model sustainable and profitable in the long-run, we simply cannot ignore a focus on the quality of training imparted to this labour and equally importantly, on the quality of service which they provide. When the West talks about frustration in dealing with Indian staff, lets for a minute, forget about their underlying distaste for our accent and possibly appearance and address another issue here: that of the utter lack of problem-solving aptitude which is all-too-apparent within the first few minutes of getting into a conversation with a helpline agent. Do organizations not lose huge sums of money if every single case is taken up with a mid-level manager? What then, besides benching, is the purpose of hiring hoards of little or badly-trained junior staff? This is employment generation and retention at its worst. Companies often complain that newly-recruited staff is not employable, i.e. the training they bring from their education institutions is so ill-suited to the demands of a real work environment, that they “spend” millions on (re)building this workforce. But I believe that to create a truly skilled worker, they need to “invest” and invest well.

On the Tata Sky front, the manager is now going to come over and attempt to fix the problem. If that too fails, Aamir Khan and Gul Panag, you will be subpoenaed. Stay tuned.