Consumers on a ghost planet 

At first glance, technology has made life easier for us. You and I order groceries on our mobile phones, and the basket arrives within minutes. Sometimes your doorbell rings as soon as you place the order, and you screw your face and say, “Who can it be?” never imagining it would be the delivery boy arriving before your eyes blink.

You are looking for a particular type of thing—a kurta, a sari, a grinder, a lamp, or a container. In the old days, you had to go from market to market, from one end of the town to another, looking for the thing and yet returning home empty-handed. Today, you do not have to go to the market. The market comes to you. It lays out before you a thousand kinds of the thing, one better than the other. Once you have decided and paid through your mobile, it reaches you at lightning speed.

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Isn’t technology a blessing? You cry out. You did not have to waste any time or fuel searching for your wants from the North Pole to the South Pole. You did not have to face the psychological torment of the overzealous shopkeepers trying to sell you things you didn’t need. You found it, paid for it, and got it at your doorstep, all instantly by merely pressing a few keys on your mobile.

But imagine that the thing that arrived wasn’t exactly what you wanted. The kurta was not a light turquoise, as you wanted; it was a dark turquoise. That is when the hell begins and your new love for technology vertically plunges from summer into winter. There is a customer care line, of course. But it is not a line. It is a chakravyuh more labyrinthine than Abhimanyu had to contend with. An automated voice of a lady asks you to press this, that, or another digit on your mobile for this, that, or another issue; and often you can’t decide which one of the choices is closest to your issue. The bodiless lady is more impatient than your grandfather and snaps the connection if you do not press any keys before she has taken another breath.

Even if you manage to press the right key, there is no guarantee you will get a human voice to speak to. Going through customer care is like roaming around a ghost planet where you can only hear disembodied voices.

However, if you are lucky enough to hear a human voice, it does not mean your grievance will be resolved. No, the voice will blame you for your fate. When you say the kurta looked light turquoise on their site, the voice will tell you, “No, it was dark turquoise, and it looked like what it was at their end.” You ask the voice to exchange the kurta for a light turquoise one, and you are told, “Sorry, we do not have a light turquoise one.” In frustration, you say, “Take it back and return my money then.” “Sorry, our company doesn’t have a refund policy,” answers the voice, “but you can return it and order another colour.” You say, “But I want light turquoise. I don’t want another colour.” The voice gets impatient like the automated lady and says, “Then you can keep the item. Dark turquoise also looks good. It is a best-selling colour.” You end the call fuming. You are stuck with dark turquoise.

Can we, as consumers, still say that technology is a blessing? We will say: may be yes sometimes. It can even be a curse. Technology is a real blessing for companies, not for consumers. They use technology to promote their sales through flashy websites, seductive advertisements, promotional calls, and product shows. They deploy an army of salespeople to entice a customer to buy a product. But once the customer has paid for the product, the sales army vanishes. Then there is the ghost planet with disembodied voices.

The companies invest far more in sales than in post-sales customer care. In the name of customer care, they have an automated voice system and cheap labour. Often, the first line of customer care is ignorant of how to solve your problem. The company has not invested in data pooling. So, all data about a customer is not available on a first-line customer care executive’s computer screen.

All data about processes for grievance resolution is not available on their screen either. So your call is transferred to a supervisor. You have to wait an age before you get to hear the supervisor. You have to narrate your story again, only to be advised to send a detailed email, giving the invoice number, the transaction number, the product code, and god knows what else. For days, there are emails back and forth, and the Greek language of the supervisor’s emails puts your intelligence to a severe test. Ultimately, while you wait for your issue to be resolved, a letter comes to you saying your grievance has been satisfactorily resolved! Please click here to give your feedback! Five stars are “excellent,” four stars are “very good...”

You swear you would never buy anything from that company and would switch to another company. Not just that, you narrate your bad experience to your family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, and they do not make any purchases from that company either. You narrate your experience in your social media posts and on the company website. Who suffers? The company.

You only have to wear a dark turquoise kurta instead of a light one. Your damage is nothing compared to the damage to the sales and revenue of the company as a result of the migration of customers. A company with poor customer care ends up boosting the sales of its competitors!

Why don’t the companies understand? It is foolish to invest 99.99 per cent of capital in production and sales and 0.1 in post-sales customer care. A brand cannot thrive without excellent customer care. They must balance the use of technology and human agency in customer care. In a country like India, where most people are rural, poor, semi-educated, and technically ignorant, the companies must invest in hiring more men and women and training and equipping them with pooled information to resolve customers’ grievances satisfactorily and promptly. They must populate the ghost planets with intelligent beings.

(The writer is a journalist and writer.)