The Hindu Business Line : Customer rage

CONTRARY to the belief that competition brought on by liberalisation and globalisation will mean a paradise on earth for customers, customer rage — an addition to the lexicon along with road rage and runway rage — is mounting.

The daily experience of customers at the hands of the so-called customer-care or customer-service departments is quite the opposite of the sweet wording of the advertisements.

Some time ago, addressing a management convention, I asked those in the large audience who were satisfied with the after sales service of companies whose products they were using to lift their hands: Not one went up!

Knowing that they are up against a tsunami of discontent, business firms nowadays have begun adopting get-away techniques to escape the fury of customers.

Unlike in the case of Government offices and undertakings, you will never find in the directory under the various private companies' names, full details of telephone numbers of individual executives of particular departments, their home numbers and so on.

You get no help from their mobile numbers as well. Most of the time, you are asked to leave a message, but it is never returned.

This kind of customer misery is not special to India alone. Here are a few excerpts from a write-up in The New York Times of December 30 to prove the point: ".... many business owners have set up elaborate screening systems designed to limit a caller's access.... Try to reach customer service at Amazon.com to fix a problem with an order and you will encounter one of the most prominent and frustrating aspects of the Internet era: A world devoid of humans. Not only is there no telephone number on Amazon's Web site, but the company makes a point of not including one. Instead, customers are asked to fill out an online form and wait for a response.... in a recent survey of 1,000 people about their experiences with customer service, the society (of Consumer Groups) found that at the top of the dislike list is that they can't find a human... You assume there are people back there somewhere, but it is as if the whole purpose of these systems is not to provide customer service but to keep the customer at arm's length."

In short, customer delight is proving to be unattainable.

Is it not a consolation that we are not alone and there are fellow-sufferers out there?

B. S. Raghavan

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