The Hindu Business Line : Diary of a call centre victim

In a business where operational excellence is a hygiene factor and the true strategic differentiator is relationship management, I would hazard that banking has gone well beyond this stage.

IT IS NO DOUBT A BOON, but it must be effectively used to create customer bonding.

It's funny how a few thousand kilometres can change the perception of India's much vaunted call centre service. Back in Chennai, we preened with pride at how this vibrant industry was adding oodles to our GDP. Some 100 degrees of longitude away, I rant and rave about how frustrating it is to be trapped in an outsourcing labyrinth from which even Abhimanyu would have found it difficult to escape, had he hung around long enough to know the secret path, of course.

When we moved to a city halfway around the world this month, we were blithely (and in retrospect, stupidly) insouciant about our banking transactions. Relying on our battery of international credit cards, the fact that Internet banking had made the world so much smaller, we toddled off happily without a care in the world. More fool us. Little did we realise that we would soon get trapped out of our accounts by a combination of circumstances. I won't bore you, Dear Diary, with the gory details: suffice it to say that I got shut out of our ICICI Internet banking because of "system failures" that took turns in disabling either my user ID or my password. Seema of the call centre assures me that it will get done in a few days - I wouldn't hold my breath, though - that's what Sangeeta, Rajan and Bala and their other cronies told me the last few weeks when I called.

May 2006

Remember that problem one year ago where a wrong debit on our Citibank card got us frothing at the bit? Well, my Citibank credit cards - all of them - now seem permanently embroiled in a dispute and I just don't see how or when it will get resolved. I protested that this was not my transaction, and for one year I have been neatly sucked into a surreal alternate reality where my only interaction appears to be with polite, but essentially ineffectual call centre operators. They listen carefully - and I find myself going through yet another recap of the transaction history. Then they send me an equally polite and even more ineffectual e-mail which promises that my problem will be dealt with shortly. Time passes ... nothing happens ... and I sigh, and pick up the phone once again, to talk to yet another disembodied person who appears to be armed with a Standard Operating Manual that has been carefully designed to drive a consumer crazy.

June 2006

Perhaps there is some method to their madness. Perhaps Citibank hopes that, given sufficient time, I will just crack up and pay the amount that was erroneously put on my statement — at some point the sheer cost of these calls and the negative energy being wasted on those eternal phone calls are bound to wear me down. So far, I am holding on to my principles, buoyed by a righteous indignation and a sense of disbelief that they could be treating an old consumer so badly. Now, had I been back home, well, I could've stormed into their office and hoped to see a real person. Or maybe even that is an illusory comfort. It would appear that the bank managers who actually run the bank have surrounded themselves with a phalanx of call centre legionaries that would put a Roman army to shame. Then an uncomfortable thought intrudes: Isn't this the business of banking? And if the call centre operators are handling all this ... well, what then are the bankers doing? Yoo hoo! Any bankers out there?

July 2006

Finally, back in India. I've come back for quite another reason, but top on my priority list is sorting out this banking brouhaha. I've managed to track down the Banking Ombudsman in Citibank and he has kindly sorted out a part of the problem. Yippee, I can use my cards again!! The dispute? Well, that seems to have been put on another investigation track. I wish I could find a person to pour out my problems to — a senior manager, that is, not another disembodied voice whose possession of just a first name signals the connection to the bank is only as a call-centre operator. Ironically, Citibank is the bank that I was so impressed with for its excellent systems and relationship management. What was that famous logo again? "We give you a banker, not just a bank." Hah, I say.

My ICICI problems are also not fully sorted out, but somehow things seem better there. At least Seema, Ganesh and their team seem genuinely concerned with helping out; and it is reassuring to get calls back from them on a regular basis, earnestly assuring me of a quick resolution. This was only possible because some manager had the sensible thought of moving the problem from standard e-mail form replies to assigning the responsibility to an empowered executive who could actually do something about it. No wonder then that I am moving my credit cards to ICICI.

At what stage does outsourcing cease to offer competitive advantage? In a business where operational excellence is a hygiene factor and the true strategic differentiator is relationship management, I would hazard that banking has gone well beyond this stage. I remember, over a decade ago, I banked with the local branch of a nationalised bank where the friendly faces of the tellers and a helpful manager took the stress out of money management. In fact, on one occasion he even called me at work to tell me that my cheque for a public issue needed another signature and he had kept it aside, rather than risk it bouncing and my losing my allotment. Today, a service like that seems laughably impossible.

Sure, in the search for improved profits it makes sense to reduce headcount and to push for an army of outsourcers who can take on the mundane job of telemarketing, dues collecting, systems management and so on. Relationships, however, cannot — indeed, should not — be outsourced. No red-blooded marketing head would outsource brand management, would he?

Then what makes them so myopic when it comes to relationship? There are plenty of studies demonstrating the cost of not outsourcing when strategically advantageous.

Perhaps we need some studies now, measuring the intangible cost of outsourcing a critical function such as customer relationship.

The irony is that managing good relationships is not mutually exclusive to having good systems. In fact, any good CRM system would be able to isolate the good eggs from the bad ones, so that the former can be treated with special care. How difficult is it for a credit card system to identify valued customers, to keep track of their problems, so that any serous issue can be escalated upward to a person with real authority? Surely, bankers could take a leaf out of service plays like pizza delivery, which leverage customer knowledge more effectively to offer better customer responsiveness. In these intensely competitive times, it is not IT that will offer a competitive advantage, but how IT is used to create customer bonding. And to create a bond, you need real people on both sides of the equation.

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

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