My badge and I

I'm working again. God, it feels good to say that. Granted, this is only for the next couple of months (because I'm almost done with the first - w00t!), and then it's back to the stress of studying and recruiting, but I'm working again. There is actually a tiny sum of money in my bank account right now that never has to be paid back to anyone. EVER.

However, I wouldn't be me if I didn't find something to whine about. So indulge me for a while.

Having worked in a tiny boutique/start-up/mom 'n' pop set-up for three years, getting used to all these processes in a huge global organization can be... bewildering. I mean, I may have rolled my eyes and torn my hair a gazillion times in those three years because people didn't seem to comprehend the point of any processes at all, but these many? Really?

For instance, there is the matter of this employee badge they gave me. Which hangs around my neck all the time. And I have to use it to open every door I go through. Which would be fine, except not being used to having mundane things such as employee badges, I keep forgetting what I'm supposed to do with it. So I do intelligent things like banging into glass doors because I forgot to wave the badge first, and then waving it over the elevator button and wondering why it's not lighting up. And then, when I went to my hotel's front desk to ask for a replacement key to my room (because y'know, I'd managed to demagnetize mine for the gazillionth time) and they asked me to show some ID, I spent five minutes rummaging through my handbag till the dude cleared his throat and pointed to my employee badge. Which was around my neck. Which has my name and photo on it. And is therefore perfectly acceptable as ID.

Sigh.

Now all this happened in the first two weeks of my internship. Since then, we seem to have got used to each other, and learned to work together.

And then for some reason, yesterday, it started acting like it has a mind of its own. It won't let me into the building. Sure, it'd turn the light green, but then the door wouldn't open. Security fixed it for me yesterday afternoon, but then this morning again, bam! same problem.

It's almost like the damn thing doesn't want me to work.

So. many. mails.

There's a client who loves to call at 6 PM in the evening with an urgent requirement that needs to go live as of yesterday. He'll chase you night and day till you close stuff and send it for him to take a look. And then he goes silent.

His subordinate tells you that if he hasn't responded, he must be okay with it, so go ahead and put it live. So you do, and feel very proud of your awesome TAT. But then the client calls, and says that you need to make changes. And you ask him, "but didn't you see it when we sent it to you for your approval?"

And he replies, "I get so many mails from you. I don't read all of them."

Really.

Whims and fancies

I keep cribbing about the utter lack of service orientation in most companies these days, and how they simply don't know how to handle customers. As a consultant, it's often quite exhausting trying to deal with the whims and fancies of various clients. Some change their mind on what they want every hour, some never get back to you on information you need but drive you crazy if you are 30 seconds late for a deadline, and some think they're the only client in the world you could possibly have and that you have no need for food or sleep. But you learn to deal with these, because, well, it's part of the job.

But on the other hand, as a consultant, I do expect to be at the receiving end of at least some basic courtesy as well. Like what, you ask? Oh I don't know, maybe like when you agree to meet someone, actually meet them?

My colleague and I travelled out of town yesterday, to meet some potential clients. One of these companies is a fairly old, well-known FMCG company. I've grown up seeing and probably using their products. We reached their office about half an hour early, and were asked to wait. After an hour passed, and we still hadn't been met by the person concerned, I went to the reception and asked how much longer we would have to wait. Which is when we were told that the person we were scheduled to meet has gone off-site on some work, and they don't know when he would be returning. When I asked for his manager, who had also said he would try to meet us, I was put on the phone with him, and he told me he had never confirmed this meeting because they have no need for our services.

I don't have a problem with people not meeting us, or not wanting to know what we do. But when you know someone is traveling to your city to meet you, tell them you don't want to meet before they travel to your city. Not when they've been waiting for the past hour in the same building you're sitting in.

PS: Tiny disclaimer here - if you're a client, or a potential client, anyone described above is not you! :)

Take that

One of my main cribbing points for India is that its customer service orientation, well, sorta sucks. You call any customer care helpline number, and I can guarantee that you'll be ready to tear your hair out within minutes.

In the last few days, I've had two interesting experiences; one which proved this opinion completely wrong, and then one that proved me completely right.

I'm supposed to coordinate all IT requirements for the firm I work in; we recently needed to order two desktops, so I was coordinating with the company we usually buy our machines from. The desktops were delivered last Saturday, and by Thursday, no one had showed up to configure them. When I emailed the contact person in Chennai, he replied someone would be in touch asap, and sure enough, someone called that afternoon. This guy, on hearing that I wanted someone to show up at the soonest, asked me to hang on, and turned to his colleague and said something fairly rude about me. When he came back on the line, I let him know that I had heard what he had said. Forget apologizing, he coolly informed me that all the engineers had visits already scheduled, and we couldn't have one visit us till the next evening. Which was the point when I lost it.

Not only did I give it off to him, but once I got off the phone, I emailed our contact person telling him what had happened. Within minutes, I received a call from him asking about what had happened, and apologizing profusely. Half an hour later, I got a call from a fairly senior guy from the company apologizing again, and assuring me that he would schedule an engineer visit at the soonest, and that he would call me as soon as he could confirm a time for me. Not only did he call me back later (twice, actually), he also had me talk to another senior guy who apologized yet again, and even thanked me for being so patient and hearing them every time. By evening, I had actually been apologized to so many times that I was heartily wishing I had never shot off that email. Plus, I'm pretty sure the guy who had spoken to me so rudely would've been sacked by then, and I was beginning to feel quite guilty about it.

On the other hand, Friday evening I hit the malls in Gurgaon and went to two-three departmental stores. The last one I visited, I paid with my debit card. The guy at the counter swiped my card and returned it to me; however, a minute or two later, he asked for my card again saying that there was some problem and that he needed to swipe it again. As I was giving him my card, I received an SMS notification saying that the bill amount had been debited from my account. When I told him this, he said that wasn't possible because the machine hadn't processed my card, and went ahead and swiped my card a second time. Immediately, I got a second SMS notification that the same amount had been debited again. When I showed this to him, he called his manager who told him this wasn't possible, and he therefore told me that I must be mistaken.

I immediately called my bank's customer care who informed me that yes, the same amount had been debited twice. Fortunately, I was able to block payment on the second transaction.

On telling the guy at the counter what the bank had said, he called his manager down. The manager came down and asked me what had happened. He heard me out with a smirk on his face, and informed me that that wasn't possible because their machines were just fine.

I can understand a machine giving problems, I can understand the guy at the counter making a mistake, and it wasn't a particularly big amount that had got debited. What annoyed me was that I was told, repeatedly, despite me showing them my SMS notifications as well as what the bank customer care officer told me, that I must be mistaken and that they have not charged me twice.

Simply making the sale to a customer very often isn't enough. We have six-seven different products of one particular electronics giant at home; we are planning to replace all of them sooner or later because their customer care is lousy. Almost everyone I know agrees that while the cars of a certain company are excellent, they wouldn't buy those cars because their service centre in Gurgaon is completely inefficient.

When companies talk about increasing sales, there are two ways they can do this, as far as my understanding is. They can either get new customers, or they can get existing customers to buy more of their products. If they want the latter to happen, their customer care needs to be, at the very least, customer friendly!

As a customer, I've seen that most companies in India either don't care about this aspect or aren't able to handle it. The company I dealt with for our desktops did excellent damage control, if not a little over the top. Whether it was because they know my firm has given them quite a bit of business in the past or whether they genuinely want to ensure that their customers are satisfied, I wouldn't know. What I do know is that I would go to them if I need more computers or laptops.

The departmental store which charged me twice and where those idiots refused to even accept that they had charged me twice? Not for a long, long time.