In the mid 1990s, while reporting an article on the opening up of industries like telecoms to private competition, I visited the "Public Grievances" office of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) in New Delhi. A queue of oppressed looking people snaked out the door. Some had waited years to transfer a connection from one address to another, others had phones that had not worked for months. At the entrance sat a severe looking woman with a sign on her desk that read, "No enquiries please." My editor at Fortune in New York found it hard to believe that even government monopolies could be this cruel.
In the past couple of weeks, I have discovered a form of time travel. This sort of service still exists, but its principal exponents are blue-chip Indian companies who have vast customer service departments whose employees are in spirit and deed like the woman at the entrance to MTNL. Send a query or write a complaint and they respond with jargon copied out of American training manuals. When I pleaded for something approaching service from Reliance Digital whose installation team did a no-show after I had waited all day at home for them to put in water filter and a washing machine, I received this empathetic reply. "At the outset, thank you for patronising with (sic) us. We understand how disappointing it can be when your expectations are not met and therefore will get back with a satisfactory solution."
Having only recently moved to Delhi, I still have a Bangalore mobile number. When the Reliance Digital customer service team did respond, they called the number of a friend's wife who had been kind enough to accompany me to the store that day. How to dial STD is apparently not in the company manual. They called her so often, she threatened to report them to the police. At last my phone rang: it was from their Bangalore service rep who said he could not find my street in the southern city. I explained that I was living in Delhi.
First impressions of chaos proved to be lasting impressions. When the installation team arrived from Reliance, it was like letting a couple of anarchists into one's home. One moment they did not have all the tools needed, the next they were demanding escalating payments for washing machine parts. One part required a jaunt to the market nearby, the next was said to cost as much as Rs 1,900. When I said I would call customer service to enquire why new customers had to pay for these, they left.
I recounted this sorry tale to friends and family, but they blamed me. My elder brother thought I had taken leave of my senses to be shopping at Reliance Digital in the first place. Friends in Delhi said I should have known small neighbourhood stores offered far better service than our industrial behemoths and wondered despairingly about my credentials as a business journalist.
Chastened, I spent a recent Sunday morning buying bathroom fittings and kitchen utensils in Lajpat Nagar. By the time I left at noon, parking was so tight, it was hard to walk amid the cluster of cars. But, the shop owner at the kitchen store did the maths in his head and produced a bill about 40 minutes faster than it had had taken the computer-aided staff at Reliance - who double-billed me for a vacuum cleaner, but at least called later to tell me. The bathroom fittings store owner in the same densely packed bazaar did a thorough inventory of every item before I left.
Lajpat Nagar felt like another country - a country with energetic and efficient entrepreneurs albeit one with messy, broken down sidewalks. By contrast, begging for service from, say, Airtel, has seemed like battling the sarkari raj of the seventies. Airtel's rep made me fill copious forms, provide PAN copies etc. The company took a week to decide they were not going to connect me because a document was missing, but no one called to let me know.
Baffled by these encounters with some of India's best known companies, I chanced upon a new book, Uncommon Service, by a Harvard professor and a consultant, and found this poignant question: "We should be living in the Century of Service - so what's going on?" That was, more or less, the paradox I put to Santosh Desai, author of Mother Pious Lady and a marketing consultant with Futurebrands. Large companies in India, he said, have a fondness for customer service as an abstraction, "but the actual customer is an object of fear and irritation. (Banks and large companies) don't like consumers. They like the idea of consumers." By contrast, the small store owner in Lajpat Nagar, he says, is "very fluid, non-linear and much more respectful of the individual."
He's right, of course. I would add that in a country where hierarchies matter, put a man in a white-collar job and he begins to feel like a bureaucrat - answerable ultimately to no one other than his immediate boss. No wonder at the end of a fortnight of being at the receiving end of such behaviour, I felt like the bullied people queuing outside the MTNL office two decades ago. I do not have the courage to go back to Reliance Digital, even to claim a refund on the item for which they billed me twice. I look forward to buying curtain material in Lajpat Nagar this Sunday instead.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
