The Hindu Business Line : John and Jane and strategy mutation

TECHNOLOGY enables managers to isolate themselves from direct consumer contact - not only do we see the same dehumanising of the employee, it also reduces every consumer and every transaction to bits and bytes.

Last month, when troubled by umpteen banking woes (Diary of a Call Centre Victim, BrandLine, July 13, 2006), I found the situation exacerbated by my inability to get through the call-centre defensive shield that surrounded the bank powers-that-be. This month, my angst persists. One friend cribbed about how he had been hit with a huge erroneous billing on his credit card, and while he was attempting to solve it, a bunch of collection thugs went over to his father's house and scared the wits out of that old gentleman. Another friend cheered me up with a hilarious e-mail - and I do hope it is apocryphal - about how a bank continued to dun a customer long after she was dead. So many people weighed in with their own anecdotes that I am convinced that mine is not an isolated incident, and that this is a pan-sectoral syndrome in India.

During this time, I was buoyed by a naïve belief that if only I could penetrate the phalanx of call-centre workers surrounding the bank's core managerial team like a protective shield, I could get someone to understand my problem. I don't mean that they should have done anything special in my case, but that they would see the organisational ramifications of how the problem arose and what they needed to fix it.

Mind you, getting through was not an easy task, requiring Holmesian investigation and tapping into old-boy networks to get the requisite numbers and e-mail IDs. It's like peeling away at an onion, I told myself, painful and tear-inducing, but once I get through to them, it will be worth it. And finally, I did unearth a bunch of managers who were senior enough to comprehend the problem and to take corrective action. Imagine my angst, then, when I found that, having hit the core, and a senior level at that, my case (duly numbered and coded) was lobbed back at the call-centre where the problems had originated.

`HANDS ARE TIED'

The response was both fascinating and disillusioning: completely savvy on internal operational processes and completely lacking a consumer-service mentality. It was as if they had become a victim of their own enabling systems. "I completely agree with you," said one senior banking manager, "but there's nothing I can do, we've got these processes, you see. My hands are tied." He, at least, was sympathetic. More disturbing was the barely concealed impatience that emanated from managers who were quite annoyed at having their peace disturbed.

Perhaps my naïveté was born of my own experience (I worked in a multinational bank, some decades ago) when the focus was on consumer centricity with an alert eye on the bottom line. This focus may have originated by default, rather than design: we were forced to quickly resolve consumer problems since to delay meant a lingering problem that would cost big bucks in terms of managerial time and energy, and given the tight headcount this was a strict no-no. We saw consumer complaints as part of the nasty but inevitable package deal - it was unpleasant, dealing with an irate consumer, but you dealt with it, and hopefully, learnt from it. And precisely because it was not an experience you wished to undergo regularly, you rapidly worked backward: fix this, and then we won't get so many complaints.

What if we hadn't had to face the consumers directly, I wonder? What if, like today, there was an army of agents to do the grunt work - would we have had the same attitude towards consumer complaints? I suspect not. I believe that the entire outsourcing phenomenon is slowly mutating the genes of customer interaction out of managerial DNA. Use it, or lose it.

I recently went to see John and Jane at the local film festival. This disquieting documentary by Ashim Ahluwalia profiles the disconnected lives of a bunch of call-centre workers. I found it profoundly disturbing. At a personal level, I hope it makes me more tolerant of call-centre agents, now that I have had a peek into their lives. At another, more philosophical level, it provided an analogy that helped me understand how banking, for one, has slowly abdicated its hold on relationships. John and Jane tells the stories of different lives and traces the trajectory of those who stick to a job they hate, seeing it as an enabling mechanism that will pull them out of lives of "quiet desperation" - in contrast, there are those who enjoy what they are doing, they get subsumed into the subculture of the pseudo-American lifestyle they are forced to adopt - to the point that they undergo a fundamental transformation: they become the job.

In much the same way, it looks to me that the call-centres are no longer just an enabling competency for the banks - or perhaps other service organisations that I have been fortunate not to collide with. They began as a cost-advantage, an enabler that promised companies scalability while still achieving stated goals of consumer-centric service. In theory, it should also help managers focus on the consumer with the same unswerving focus of Arjuna aiming at a bird ("I see only the round black eye of the bird"). But when these same managers find themselves trapped and limited by operations and enablers of their creation, you begin to realise that somewhere along the way, this creation has assumed a life of its own, larger than, and overpowering the original strategic objectives that gave birth to it. No matter what the stated strategy is, it is the call centre that is shaping the actual, on the ground actions. And over a period of time, as managers lose their customer interaction gene, and rely ever more on call centres, the stated strategy will also change.

Remember that scene in Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin's 1936 masterpiece of social protest, where he is fed by an assembly line and almost consumed by one? Chaplin satirised the Taylorian vision of transforming factories into superbly oiled systems that drove machines and people hard in the interests of maximising profitability. In that view of a soulless business world, the employee had become a slave of the machine. Consider today's science-fiction-come-true world, and you can see the promise of the information or knowledge age distorting relationships in the same manner.

Today, technology enables managers to isolate themselves from direct consumer contact - not only do we see the same dehumanising of the employee, it also reduces every consumer and every transaction to bits and bytes. In this linear programming exercise between cost reduction and consumer satisfaction, very clearly it is the cost function that has been allowed to dominate.

This has nothing to do with technology as such. I am not making a case for a return to a more Luddite world: I do believe that technology and indeed, the entire outsourcing model, has huge benefits to offer to both consumers and organisations. Yet, it is important to see these as enablers, powering an organisation's efforts to achieve its strategy - not mutating the strategy itself in an auto-immune attack, atrophying key managerial competencies and creating vulnerabilities in the very system that it was meant to enhance.

Flip this around, allow technology to become an tool rather than a limiter, and organisations can take control of consumer-centric issues once again.

(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation. Karategy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd.)

More Stories on : Customer Relationship Management | Outsourcing | Karategy

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