Indians & Customer Service

Of late, all my friends and acquaintances seem to be afflicted by a strange new disease – dissatisfaction with customer service. Ten minutes into the conversation, after the traffic, infrastructure etc have been exhausted as topics, we start cribbing about bad customer service is from some poor corporation. Normally it is the cell phone company; other times, it is the credit card company. It is almost as good a conversation filler as ‘back home’ talks among the NRI crowd.

Agreed, we are all at that certain age when cantankerousness is not only expected but also very satisfying. Methinks it is our poor substitute for more lecherous pleasures, again, since we have reached that certain age where anything remotely enjoyable is either bad for you or not decorous. (When and how that age comes about is a topic for another day, hopefully. In fact it has to be explored if the age is physical, somatic or mental. But I digress …). Even granting the tetchiness, I feel that our ire at bad customer service is all out of proportion with the trigger.

Let me give you an example: earlier, say 5-6 years ago, if a plumber told he will come at 10 AM Tuesday, it was understood all around that it is merely his intention and one was quite happy if he turned up on Tuesday at all. No squabbling, no irritation, no nothing. Similarly, if the cell phone dropped a call, there was an elaborate etiquette on who should call back whom but there was no beating of the breasts or tearing of hairs. (Kids: there was a time when one was happy to get thru to somebody in another metro within an hour by using a lightning call. No kidding and one paid a real bomb too!) But now, all it takes is a surly tone from the hassled customer support kid and we go ballistic.

I think the reason for this has to be among the following causes: (a) we have lost our chalta hai attitude without developing the ability to get service, (b) we don’t really understand what is a commensurate level of service for the money we pay and (c) customer service really sucks. It would be a cop out to say that it is a mixture of all three. Sure, it is a combination of all these and more causes. However, I believe that our expectation does not match what is being offered, which, obviously, is a function of what we are willing to pay.

Management theory defines customer satisfaction as Performance minus Expectation (it says that in whole tomes but that is it, in essence). As a culture, though, we want a Rolls Royce for the price of a Maruti. So, our expectation is never tempered by what we pay for the service. Therefore even very good service does not satisfy us – only exceptional service would do! Taking the cell phone example further, the ARPU for Indian providers is among the lowest in the world (~ USD 3 per month, if I remember correctly). For that we have fairly high technology services like 3G and very interesting (even ruinous) rate plans like per second billing, location based billing, unlimited data etc. In addition to all this, we went and invented the ‘missed call’ – an absolutely brilliant but ultimately unproductive (for the carrier) communication channel.

Have a look at the ARPU data by country (slightly old but the major trends have not changed).

Indian ARPU clearly is the bottom of the pack. Ask yourself honestly – is your expectation from your provider on service quality not closer to the Japan end of the spectrum?

I hold no candle for the carriers – I am just as irritated when a call is dropped or when a standing instruction goes missing as anybody else. All I ask for is a bit of fairness in expectation.

It is not worthy of comment that the dog talks badly, it is a wonder it talks at all!