CRM-Customer Rage Management

 

A few recent experiences have made me believe that CRM actually stands for Customer Rage Management. And, we are doing a pretty bad job of it.

 

Allow me to give just two examples from one category that should understand CRM much better than others, because in one sense they are in the communications business.  The category is telecom.

 

Recently, we moved house to a suburban part of Bangalore called Sarjapur, which lies outside of Koramangala, spank in the middle of the IT Corridor between Whitefield and Electronic City in Hosur. The skyline here has completely changed with the young software professionals and BPO recruit picking up flats as if they were candies.

 

We have an independent house built on sites, which do not have much of an address except Land Survey and Site Nos. We had to create our own address, subsequently edited by the local postman to simplify life for himself.

 

We had applied to Tata Telcom for their 'Walky' phone with the 'longish' addresses with Survey and Site No etc. The phone was installed and we have being using it for the past two months. Subsequently, we filled up a change of address notification form, which was essentially an edit of the address as suggested by the postman. Hence, Survey and Site No went and only the bare details remained.

 

Because we applied for a change of address, the company dispatched an address verification person.  The person reported that the address could not be located leading to our outgoing being cut. 

 

This prompted a visit to the Customer Service Centre on Hosur Road, opposite the Acropolis. We asked for reason for the outgoing being cut and were told the bill was not paid. We asked for the bill to settle the amount and discovered that the due date was two weeks hence. When we took up the issue of due date we were told about the address verification incidence.

 

Our view:

 

q       You are a telecom company

q       You have our telephone number which you do not fail to utilize to the limit to remind when payment is due and so on and so forth

q       However, when a person comes for address verification he does not have the benefit of calling the number to locate the address

q       Subsequently, you disable outgoing causing great inconvenience to the customer, who you have spent crores of rupees in advertising talking about the delight of being a Tata Telecom customer with Saurav and Pathan thrown in for good measure

q       When the customer comes to the so called Customer Care Centre he has to wait for 45 minutes because the Credit guy and the Manager are having lunch and could not care less for the customer

q       Irrespective of all of above, you keep harassing the customer to pay the non-overdue "overdue" bill because that's how the customer has been flagged in the collection agencies call database

 

The customer is outraged (a very normal scene in any Customer Care Centre today) and there is no books or training to tell a Customer Care Agent how to deal with Customer Rage Management. The so-called Customer Care Agent cannot do a thing about it because it is "system" stupid.

 

Net result, the customer walks out and walks into AirTel to pick up a Pre-paid to take care of his outgoing calls. At AirTel, the customer (yours truly) has all the papers including his Driver's License, photograph and cash and is all set to walk out with a Pre-paid Card. The System Strikes back. They need a photocopy of the License. So, do you have a photocopier, you ask? No, they do not and the prospect (lured by crores of advertising) needs to now go across the road and get the measly photocopy done and return to be blessed with a Pre-paid. The customer gets up and goes out of the door along with his Lifetime Value for the Brand.

 

It is at moments such as these that you grudgingly admire our Public Sector firms, whether BSNL, LIC, State Banks, Indian Railways, Indian Airlines...They may be incompetent (not true anymore), corrupt (less so) and lazy (not always if some money is dangled before them), but they are not arrogant and pretentious. They operate within their limitations and do not raise hopes with advertising that does not deliver where it matters – customer experience. Unless, the issue of customer experience is addressed, it is not the private players who will provide competition to the PSUs, but the other way round if the Petroleum companies response to Reliance and Essar and Shell is anything to go by.

 

Anybody for a book and training program for Customer Rage Management or Customer Relationship Management Systems that works for the Customer.

 

Mathew Anthony