Customer service in India

My dad forwarded me this comment in India currents.

It is almost always assumed that customer service in India is inferior. 

Tamil:  Vaadikkaiyaalar sevai.  Hindi:  Grihak Seva.  In fact, I have seen in many many banks and commercial establishments – a famous write-up from Gandhi about customer service, how customer is the most important person to visit, etc.

 

I have a different opinion on this:  I think Indians are not ready to pay for customer service and pay a premium.  I have operated in India market, and have sold to USA market for so long, and I know how Indian corporate and consumers want the cheapest, with some compromises.  I know how we make choices of grocery stores – go and stand in the line, and be ready to take hardships for saving a few bucks, in comparison to shopping in FoodWorld or Nilgiri’s. 

 

I cannot overwhelmingly call it as an “Indian” thing either.  I know how WalMart here in the USA is more popular than Target, or how very few people are ready to spend the extra money for going to Bloomingdales as opposed to Macys.  In both these cases, customers choose to receive lesser customer service in return for better price.  I know how small the first class cabin is in flights compared to the cattle class, and I know how bad the cattle class in the USA is compared to Indian Economy class in flights.  I do not know if you all know, but recently there was a stampede in Walmart on the Black Friday for getting  a deal!  I know that ecommerce sales – with very less customer service – is striving in the USA because of cheaper prices.

 

Overall, the compromise is between price and customer service, and you get what you pay for.  I think India generally does not want to pay more for better customer service.

What happened to Bhoo again?

Oops!  With a blink of an eye, 4 months are past since my last post!  That is what “adult education” does to you.  I have ended up joining Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, for pursuing an Executive MBA, and that – combined with Aspire and family is keeping me so busy that I am not finding time to write.

Of course, there are a lot of developments.  A new website for Aspire Systems (www.aspiresys.com), a new community blog for Product Enginnering (www.producteering.org) where I have a lot of hands and a lot of writing.

I even wrote an article in NJTC – on Producteering, and conducted a webinar as well.  Please have a look at those within www.aspiresys.com under resources.

Can captive centers be saved?

Here is another article in the series of articles about how captive center is not the best thing to do if you want to do offshoring.  This article gives tips on how to save a captive center if it is just a data-center.

Offshore Outsourcing: Can This Captive Center Be Saved?

Building a network!

I know I wrote a post on this subject earlier.  I recently encountered a book:

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about building a network:

Never Eat Alone.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385512058/qid=1129837551/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6971938-7142216?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I got it from the local library, and it proved to be a great great book in relationship building…

Bhoo

Resolutions

Resolutions:

I know the power of symbolism and the power of tracking annual goals.  Resolutions, particularly during the new year can be a powerful tool for personal improvement and meeting personal goals.

Companies have financial years and quarters of accounting to measure progress.  On a personal front, new year certainly provides for a very perceptible way to set goals and measure progress against.  But, on a personal front, there is no easy mechanism to track – like – a company may have annual sales or growth goals – but – it will typically have it written and baselined somewhere, communicate to a larger set of stakeholders, and also track it quarter by quarter.  It becomes too difficult to do these things for an individual in a personal level.

The other aspect is the continuity of perseverance.  The vigor you feel when you make the resolutions during the beginning of the year, typically looses steam through the year. 

In my opinion – the only way resolutions can be effective is if you do all of these things:

– Prepare a medium that you will keep for several years where you can record the goals or resolutions for each year and monitor progress at the end of each year.

– Communicate it wide, to friends and family – the stakeholders who will give you gentle and encouraging reminders rather than the “non-believers” who will say - “I do not think you can do it this year!”.

– Break-it up into smaller goals every quarter of the year, and set-up weekly goals for seeing progress.  As an example – If you are quitting smoking – and if it is abrupt – weekly progress will be “1 week since I smoked”, “2 weeks since I smoked” and so on…If you are looking at gradual process – Keep a weekly goal again – I am smoking 140 cigarettes a week, and I will reduce it to 120, 100, 80, 60, 40, 20, 0 over the next 7 months as an example and keep a weekly record.

Of course, exceptions prove the rule, and I know of friends who use resolutions as a tool without doing any of these things.

Second decade of outsourcing!

Informationweek article again triggered angry comments.  There is not a single thing in the world that is “ALL” advantages and “NO” disadvantages.

The key is balance.

One angry comment calls outsourcing as “corporate prostitution”.

When you talk about “Nothing matters but the bottom line, corporate prostitution, etc”, it is not limited to outsourcing. As an example – take cell-phone contracts that ties you up for 2 years – or many many other examples.On the other hand, come to think of it – bottom-line does matter. Profits do matter.

It is another thing if a company starts losing revenue because a competitor who does not use outsourcing provides better service. Then, the company that uses globalization will suffer from bad service or products and hence lose its customers.

It is just that in-spite-of the disadvantages, there are firms that have increased their competitiveness due to outsourcing. That is the only reason outsourcing thrives.

If there is a thinking that “customer service” in a company exists because of morality or ethics, I can only call it “naive”. Companies have customer service because otherwise they lose their competitiveness and business. So, the entire “customer service” is a competitive weapon to increase profits, not an “ethics” or “moral” responsibility.

If and when that competitiveness depletes, irrespective of the ethics or morals, companies will move away from outsourcing or offshoring.

Climbing the offshoring ladder

CIOL article has a nice section about the difference between OPD and OSD. That is Outsourced Product Development vs generic Outsourced Software Development for you.

In the industry that is obsessed with 3-letter abbreviations it seems very appropriate to write it that way. 

What Does It Take to Get IT Outsourcers to Innovate?

Excellent article in CIO.com about how IT Outsourcers can be innovative.

I loved some of the practical comments that explained why it is not as easy to do it as a service provider, and also how more can be got from an outsourcing relationship.

My thought:

Very interesting! We are a service provider – and we work with ISVs – the software vendors – whose entire existence is dependent on their innovation.

At one point in time, we even considered if we can christen our tag-line as “Outnovate” meaning Outsourcing Innovation.

Not because we could innovate completely for our customers. But because creating success through innovation does not stop with idea – but success comes because of execution of an innovative idea. Since we help “execute” innovative ideas – which is all we do due to our work with innovative software firms – we thought we can call ourselves as a company that you can outsource innovation with!

But, at a very fundamental level – outsourcing is about handing over non-core activities to experts in those non-core activities. How can “innovation” be outsourced? Is that a non-core activity of yours?

Can the outsourcing company be made to go beyond what the customers are specifying? Yes. Only by involving the people in your decision process, and by setting the expectation and reiterating the expectation.

As service providers – do we want to promise that to our customers. We sure do. Do we have people who can contribute improvements beyond what is being specified? We sure do! But, does that happen automatically? No. Like in any people process, stakeholder commitment and follow-through is needed for harnessing the potential of any initiatives beyond the call of duty.

So, my 2 cents to CIOs and CTOs:

– Ask questions triggering innovative answers / solutions. Keep asking with all people involved including your internal people and outsourcer’s people.

– Show that you are willing to listen to the comments / suggestions and if you do not, take the pain of explaining why you do not want to take it. Nobody wants to advise / recommend to deaf ears.

– Make sure that you respect the people involved as people with ideas that can improve your business.

Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again!

Nytimes article said it!

The easy assumption here is that the learning stays, and there will be cautious optimism  – as the disaster that was dotcom bust – is hardly 7 years back – and we can expect that there will be reasonable caution.  But world has proven time and again that history repeats itself and some lessons are never learnt.  In some senses, some lessons should not be learnt!

Entrepreneurship is about taking risks.  As much as we want to take a “right-brain” or objective, cautiously optimistic approach – where the learning of the past matters – entrepreneurial spirit prevails.  Not just with the promoters but also with the VCs and the other stakeholders.  Hence a lot of activities happen with just a whiff of optimism, sometimes bordering on sheer “hope”. 

I still see a lot of hockey stick projections of revenue growth – including in case of my own company Aspire Systems. 

But, I belong to the “believer’s club”.   Optimism prevails all the naysayers and the pessimists – not just in the IT industry – but in the economy as a whole and how the world will be a better place with all this innovation and entrepreneurship.

 There is a lot of activity in the internet-based entrepreneurship now.  Almost as much of a frenzy as it was in the last golden rush – and the subsequent crash.  Is there so much mad-rush with people jumping up and writing millions of dollars worth of checks? – I do think there is a certain amount of caution.

A larger percentage of VC activity in what I see in the market is with tough questions asked more than what was asked earlier.  Revenue models, proof of concept, existing customer base – the right fundamentals are being looked at.

So, do I believe that there will be an impending crash?  As much cold I feel in my spine – of pessimistic risk – I believe that no crash will happen this time.

All the very best for all the risk-takers – the entrepreneurs who make this world a better place every day!

What is cooking at OPD?

Excellent reality check by Pratima Harigunani in CIOL on the status of Outsourced Product Development.  It also offered some amount of reality check and what the OPD companies need to be doing.

http://www.ciol.com/content/2880799376.aspx#comment

As I mentioned to her – the secret for the OPD firms is for the software engineers to become product engineers or producteers.  In other words – from cooks, we need to become chefs!

To that end, we have created the term “Producteer”, which is Aspire’s trademark now!  Here is the run up to our concept of Producteer: