Businesses have, over the years, as a result of too much automation and
outsourcing, lost their connect with customers. A company is reduced to a mere
brand and everything else is outsourced to third-party vendors.
The Governor of the Reserve Bank of
India, D. Subbarao, says Indians are using far too much cash for settling their
bills for his liking. Well, in recent times, I am guilty of contributing a bit
more than I used to earlier.
My credit card was deactivated the
other day because my bank suspected that its security might have been
compromised. It is now nearly two weeks and there has been no sign of a new card
being delivered to me, although I have spoken to someone or the other at their
24x7 help desk more than once. You would have thought they will be keener than I
in ensuring that I get to spend on my credit card. Evidently, that doesn’t seem
to be the case. Rather, I should say they are keen alright; it’s just that their
systems are simply not up to it.
My guess is that my bank is not
alone in losing touch with its customers. We have all been ‘Bangalored’. Not in
the sense in which some code writer in Newark, New Jersey, felt about it after
losing his job to someone in the Garden City of India. But something far
subtler.
‘Impeccable’ logic, but…
We are all victims of business
processes that are way too much automated and outsourced for our own good.
Businesses have over the years lost their connect with customers to a point
where they seem to be saying, ‘‘Why do I need to connect with my customers when
my BPO vendor is tasked with doing it?”
Impeccable though the logic is, on
surface, the reality is quite different. No matter how clever your business
processes are, they are not good enough to visualise every possible contingency
so as to activate some part of their outsourced automated process.
Take my case. It is clear that the
bank does not have a system that would prompt it to say, ‘‘Hey, here is a
customer who has been using the card at least once every day but has not done so
for the last fortnight’’. Some part of its system must have then triggered a
telephone call to me saying: ‘‘Sir, I hope you are alright?’’
‘‘What, Oh! you are just recovering
from a by-pass surgery?’’
‘‘Hope you get well soon, but while
we are at it, may be we could interest you with our new Bancassurance health
plan?’’ The third-party vendor clicks a button on the CRM application to say,
Send a get well card and an order to the florist for a single-step rose (if the
customer is a silver-card holder) or a full bouquet (if he holds a platinum
card). You know, stuff like that.
If I were to put a time-frame on
when the rot really began, it was, perhaps, when the first of the automated
mailers began to land at your desk. I don’t know about you, but I have, on many
occasions, received a mail that said, “This is a computer-generated letter,
hence no signature required”. Now, this assertion has always foxed me. I mean,
why is that so? For instance, why have people, who have sent a mail in the past,
never felt the need to say, “This is a ‘Godrej’ typewriter-generated letter and
hence no signature required”.
Don’t reply, please!
Even if I accept it as one of those
innumerable idiosyncrasies of administrative bureaucracy, I definitely draw the
line against another claim about computer-generated mail that says, ‘‘it is an
automated response and hence please do not reply to this mail’’!
It is mystifying why some one who
has taken the trouble to send me some information should not want to hear what I
would have by way of response. Even Ogodougobo, the wife of the jailed Nigerian
Finance Minister, who I haven’t known since Eve, who writes to me seeking help
with regard to unlocking some money stashed away in a Cayman Island bank
account, is anxious to receive my response. If I ignore her mail, she would send
me a reminder!
But my banker, with whom I have a
relationship going back many years in time, doesn’t think he can get anything
worthwhile from me by way of a response when he sends me the credit-card
statement. So much so, if I want to draw his attention to a bill for $500 at a
casino in Las Vegas that I haven’t been to, well at least not on that particular
occasion, you would think that he will make it easier for me to do so by simply
clicking on the ‘reply’ button.
If you try clicking on the ‘reply’
button, your computer would, in the blink of an eye, tell you that the mail
could not be delivered. I suspect the only thing my banker wants to hear from me
is that I am interested in rolling the payment over in 36 easy instalments at 48
per cent rate of interest. An automated process takes over the transaction the
moment I click on the hyperlink located very conveniently right below the
amount.
Prisoner of automation
But, of course, I am being rather
uncharitable to my banker. It is not that he doesn’t want to hear from me.
Make no mistake about it. He values
it with a fervour and devotion as befitting a manager who has just returned from
Harvard Business School Executive Development Programme on customer relations
management.
He is quite simply a prisoner of
his bank’s systems. Every facet of any business, for that matter, has been
sliced and dissected in every possible way as to extract the last ounce of
efficiency from the process. While that is fine, it often leads to unexpected
blowbacks. Business comprises innumerable silos of autonomous processes that
each of them has no cultural memory of its linkage with other processes, up and
down stream.
This is what I suspect happens at
my bank’s credit-card section. There is an outsourced third-party vendor for
making the sales pitch to prospective customers; a second one to evaluate the
application; a third to handle the paperwork and the choice of a courier to
deliver the credit card; a fourth to actually deliver the card; a fifth to
handle the accounting; a sixth to deal with the default follow-up, and if some
strong-arm tactics are to be used, then a seventh one as well. Now, all these
have to be connected to one another in some abstract way so that the bank stays
aligned to its larger business purpose, whatever that may be.
Scramble for outsourcing
Businesses view their operations in
such terms as sales, finance, production, supply chain, HR, and so on. This was
useful and, in fact, helped promote specialisation and efficiency in operations.
From here, it became a simple step to take a closer look at business processes
for efficiency and cost improvements.
The next stage in the evolution
would be outsourcing of all processes that can be conveniently carried out by
third-party vendors. Businesses have long since moved on from merely confining
themselves to outsourcing housekeeping services or managing staff canteen with
contract labour.
It is fair to say that that they
are currently engaged in the process of exploring the limits of outsourcing.
This quest for the Holy Grail is a company that is reduced to a being a mere
brand and everything else is business operations that are outsourced to
third-party vendors.
This is fine. Except that somewhere
along the way, you lose touch with the reality of a customer being the focal
point of all businesses operations. Peter Drucker once said that the purpose of
business is to create and keep a customer. I wonder if the second part of his
counsel is being lost somewhere in this mad scramble for outsourcing.
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