Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Call centers have changed the way we people interact with corporations. Though I wouldn’t agree if one said that this was a welcome change. There have been a lot of bad episodes, here is one of them.

My savings account is with Citibank. Sometime last year, it so happened that I was charged twice for the same transaction. Now that is an uncomfortable position to be in, but luckily the shopkeeper was a nice man, and assured me that he would provide all the help I would need. He gave me a copy of his copy of the transaction, called somebody up from his bank, who tallied the transaction in their account. All I had to do was get somebody from Citibank to confirm that it was their issue.

Now that turned out to be an impossible task. I realized there was not much to do, except to try and get every call center operative to help me out with his. This is because even if you go to a Citibank branch, there is nobody there who is responsible for the savings accounts. You have to ring the call center.

So every morning, I used to get up, call Citibank, talk to a new operator every time, tell them about my problem, and try to get a fix. They were very nice people, and every morning they confirmed that this would get sorted out as the earliest and they would do whatever it was they could, because they really didn’t have much authority to do anything.

After a week or so, I realized I was getting nowhere, Citibank had supposedly sent a letter, which never reached me, and they were going to send it again. I decided that I had to vent my anger somewhere, and walked in the Citibank brank in MG Road, to beat the crap out of the manager.

There was a beautiful girl at the counter who rudely told me to wait outside, and I did for close to half an hour. When all else failed, I did what I should have done earlier, I started shouting at everybody with a Citibank tag, to get me to talk to the Manager. No threats, nothing, just a loud voice, echoing across the halls, and lightning fell on anybody who suggested otherwise, or asked for some more time. Eventually, the manager called me in, asked me what the issue was.

And guess what, within five minutes, I was out of there, and my balance was restored the next day. Five minutes!!!

Things get so easy when you are talking to a person, who can be held responsible.

Call centers, might be really good for the corporations, but on the whole, it feels like we, the customers, really don’t matter. After all, what can we do, other than moving to a different bank. And how much difference does it make to the bank? Besides all that is too much inconvenience anyways.

I sell the bad will, I tell everybody that the call center at Citibank sucks, what more I am even blogging about it. And it’s not just me, a lot of people have had similar episodes. And what does the bank do about it? Yeah right, they call me after two months and ask me if I was satisfied with the transaction. And if I say no, some call center operative will lose their job. But this is not what customer satisfaction is about. Is it?

I can write a CRM software to help them keep track of customers, and of the related issues, but no software in the world can make the corporation act. This is why the software industry, no matter how much it grows, will always be second grade to people. This is why any large corporation, needs to pay attention to the people, more than anything else, especially now.

UPDATE : I found a list called gethuman, it lists ways on how to get to a human, when you call a call center. Though it is for USA, I guess we can compile one for India too. Updates anybody?
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