Wallposts & Tweets Are In;
Complaint Boxes Are Out
SANJAY PINTO
You may have come across an SMS rant
about how a pizza reaches home faster than an ambulance! Whether or not that
smacks of exaggeration is debatable. But there can be no two opinions that the
response time is such a key element in customer interface that today a business
entity can do a Dale Carnegie and ‘Win Friends & Influence People’ on the
social media with ease. Quite like Sunny Gavaskar who was known to use the pace
of the Carribean quickies to make the ball reach the boundary faster,
mobile operators’ twitter handles like @ Airtel_Presence or @VodafoneIN
or @TataDocomo have been converting a good number of complainants or feedback
providers into followers. The response time, they claim, is less than ten
minutes and their dedicated cyber net teams are active between six in the
morning till twelve midnight. Let off steam on twitter about a connectivity
issue or even the eternal telemarketing menace despite being on the Do Not
Disturb registry and you get an immediate reply with a request for more details
through a Direct Message. The trick here is that you need to follow each other
to be able to send direct messages. That’s the first step in the following, as
it were. Of course, the proof of the following is in the follow up! With more
than fifty thousand to a lakh tweets and twenty five to fifty thousand
followers, these private mobile operators have realised the scope for a
speedy redressal mechanism on twitter and facebook. Or call it customer anger
management if you like!
Contrast this proactive approach with
what I’m tempted to refer to as the King Herod mindset of a public sector
telecom body . The Roman King had come up with a fiat to kill all male new born
babies just to wipe out any future threat to the throne. With a similar broad
sweep strategy, to remind a few defaulters, every subscriber is disturbed. So
even those who have paid their bills, are woken up with reminder calls at odd
hours. I have even got SMS payment acknowledgements at two in the morning and a
payment reminder the next day, perhaps unwittingly designed to ruin that rare
afternoon siesta! Surely, they can spare customers who have paid up, of this
nuisance, instead of reminding everyone in their database with an afterthought:
“If you have already paid your bill, please ignore this”. What’s worse,
the other day my broadband connection stopped working. The Service Centre
nonchalantly mentioned that a server was being changed. How about the courtesy
of advance intimation to customers that even Electricity Boards give out?
If private players can reach out to
customers on the social media, and even the Chennai Traffic Police or the US
Consulate in Chennai can engage with the public on facebook quite
effectively, what is stopping public sector undertakings and other government
departments from keeping up with the times? Mindsets. And archaic rules like
banning social media sites in office computers. As if most people don’t have
them on their mobile phones. In this age of mobile number portability, the customer
may not be the king but definitely a chooser. And it does make sense to reach
out to a few crore people on their very own platform.
Ideally, every civic body, every police
commissionerate, as well as other departments like Registration, Passport, Transport,
Electricity and so on that have high public interaction, must be on the social
media. Let the respective pages be monitored by the department heads
periodically. With the private sector, we have a choice; with some of those
government wings, we don’t. All the more reason for interaction between public
servants and the people they serve, in the medium of today. When let’s say,
a senior citizen, sitting at home, manages to reach the Police
Commissioner at a designated hour, that’s empowerment. That’s accountability
too. Wallposts and tweets are here to stay. The days of shabby complaint boxes
opened once in six months, are over.
(An edited version of this column of
mine was published in The Hindu)
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