Without a line of interaction

In Service Marketing there’s something called ‘a line of interaction’. If we take the example of a restaurant let’s say, there can be numerous lines of interaction. A line of interaction basically means point where a part of the service comes into direct contact with the customer, or in plain motherhood statement it’s the ‘moment of truth’. The waiter is one, the menu is another, the food is the next, and the bill that comes towards the end is also a line of interaction.

Now most people say and I’m sure even you’ll agree that lines of interaction are extremely essential to the service organisation’s success.

Now let’s turn the tables on this statement and look at it from the other way around. There’s this hotel in Korea, the name of which I forgot, has defied this whole idea of line of interaction. The hotel has virtually scrapped all the lines of interaction which one might call essential.

If you want to book a room, you call the number, and the voice on the other side is an AVR (automated voice response system). This means there’s a computer on the other end to take your call rather than a real person, so the first line of interaction is compromised. The AVR gives you an automatically generated code, which you note down and is a reference for the room you booked in the hotel. You drive your way down to the hotel, go to the basement where again there’s no security guard at the gates, since the gates are automatic. You key in the code given at the gate, and this is where you officially check into the hotel. You go ahead and park your car specifically at the slot allotted to you, and to make sure you find it, the lights of that slot start blinking. So line of interaction (security guards) compromised again.

Then you go up the lift, into your room, and done! Not a single human line of interaction in the entire process. You finish all your naughty business and get out. The payment is made by an escrow so the hotel never comes to know the real identity of the person. Dainty no? Now who told a line of interaction is essential?

Microsoft - A victim of its own sword

People really hate Microsoft sometimes. Poor thing is always cursed for the BSODS (blue screen of deaths) that it gives; or the buggy source code that it has.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see Windows evolving from 95 to Vista. Win95 seems such a stripped off and bare bone version of Window’s latest OS, the Vista. And the more I look back, the more I miss the previous OS’s that the company came out with.

Life with Windows 98 was so simple. Even after its buggy core and non-slick, non-transparent, non-aero interface it used to do the job. It wasn’t as paranoid as Vista because it never gave me any security alerts every time I ventured into installing a new software. Vista tries to be the wise guy and downloads updates and other hard-disk hogging bull crap without informing me. The moment I turn off ‘automatic updates’ or ‘data execution prevention’ the entire system goes berserk as if I’ve committed a carnal sin and keeps pestering me to turn it back on!

An OS is supposed to be smart; and being smart doesn’t mean doing things on its own, it means knowing where its making the blunders. Sadly, none of the Windows that Microsoft has released are smart. They are either plain ‘dumb’ or they try to be the ‘wise guy’. And quite naturally as one hard core gujju that I am, I’d rather prefer someone that obeys me rather than acting up and doing things that I haven’t asked to.

Another sad part about Windows is the fact that it can never let go of its past. Because Windows supports a large range of softwares, it needs the flexibility to integrate additional plug-ins for audio, video and other codecs. Thus in hindsight, Windows would never be able to let go of its past. There will always remain a backward compatibility option so that your old softwares (like SPSS 10.0) works even on Windows Vista smoothly.

And because of this fact, no Windows will ever be bug-free, because even before the new OS is built its already carrying the older bugs from the previous OS’s core. Microsoft would never be able to built Windows on a clean slate unless it shreds off its past.

Now leaving the past aside and looking at the present (Vista to be precise) the latest OS really seems to be a sad copy of the Mac OS X. The transitions, the icons which have a fold on the top right, the way the text box illuminates every time I click on are crude plagiarisms right from the Mac. Its quite disheartening to know that there can be such similarities between the Mac and Vista. Surely such things wouldn’t have happened out of coincidence! I’m not too dumb to take that. But it just gets you thinking that is there such a dearth of creative heads of Microsoft that they cannot create one stunning GUI without taking the help of Mac?

As a Windows user (out of chance and not out of choice...) I really wish a lot more from these guys. Constant upgrades and support doesn’t show how great the OS is, it only shows how abysmal is the quality that you guys have to give me patches and updates to make sure that my laptop doesn’t conk off anytime soon.!

The Caviar Story

If there's one thing a marketer needs to learn, is to tell really good stories. Great brands are not made out of just the product; but everything around it, and people like Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian can really tell you how great brands are made. They are made out of sheer perseverance, and preserving that story, that legacy through generations.

Caviar, a phenomenon that arose out of the devastation that World War I had wrecked upon the European countries and Russia. It was a product that the Russian government sold to the French and German traders for cash since they wanted some foreign exchange to rebuild their economy which was in shambles after the Russian revolution. From here begins the caviar story.

Caviar, essentially is nothing but salted fish eggs! But then like French food, the French traders took this slimy black miniature beans, added all the fancy stuff like myths, exoticism and legends and completely converted the product into an exotic food item.

Caviar is not just salted fish eggs today. It's a testament to the Petrossian brothers who fled lands during the Russian revolution and then finally sold Caviar to the French. It is a mouthpiece that talks about the adversaries of war and how people got out of it. If you strip off Cavair from its brand, you can't tell one brand from the other. Most connoisseurs loath to admit it, but the fact is you can't tell one caviar from the other. Everything is just the same!

Stairs are the best chairs

There was this simple thought that came up at a Services Marketing Class, as to the kind of seats that we sat in. Typically if you look at an MBA classroom it is a horse-shoe-type setting, where there's a professor who teaches by standing at something called a melting-pot. Keeping the jargons aside, he basically facilitates the shooting of ideas from one corner of the class to the other. In fact b-schools like HBS and Wharton take pride in having horse-shoe classes! I really don't find it to be a big deal. Some arguments in an MBA are really without reason at times. It reminds me of the saying; All fart and no shit.!

Anyways, so that was one setting. But what I'm trying to say is that these settings were meticulously 'made' and were given proper thought when being constructed. But a setting that so intuitively got into our system was something that was never meant to be a seat in the first place. I'm talking about the stairs.

Stairs is perhaps one of those places where you just go and sit. In a classroom, you decide which end to sit, whereas when it comes to stairs, you never really decide do you? You just go there and sit.

Steps/stairs give you all the benefits that a normal chair does not. You can alter height, decide how much you wanna stretch yourself, use other stairs as table-tops, sit at different levels on the steps and surprisingly, you can see everyone even though you sit at different levels.

Stairs don't have cushions, they don't have a back rest, they don't have pneumatic bars to increase/decrease height, yet most students find them the best places to sit and chat. And believe me, they are excellent places to work on your laptops as well.

Now the question is what has all this got to do with the whole MBA setting? Think about it like this… Having swanky classrooms isn't just the only way to make a b-school experience great. Or having great dormitories isn't the only way a hostel life can be improved.

Think… Why can't people put power points near staircases so that we can use our laptops on AC power? Why can't you have vending machines at staircases and not near the canteen? There've been a million times when my batch mates would want a can of Coke while smoking at the staircases. But they were too lazy to go and get one from the vending machine which was 4 floors below.

It's quite surprising that neither the architects, nor the civil engineers nor the deans or directors of educational institutes got this bonding between stairs and students.

I save my a$$ when in trouble, I don't care about you

Did you ever realize how paranoid banks are when sending out money? And also on the other hand, we as customers too are lousy enough not to care about how the banks treat us.

Take the example of a cheque vs. a pay-in slip. Banks use extensive methods to make sure that when money goes out of the bank, it goes to whom it’s meant for. But when the cash comes in, it really doesn’t matter to them who’s depositing the cash and into whose account.

The instruments banks use are pretty much evidence to that effect. A typical cheque from any bank is printed on thick paper, which is printed using special ink, and also contains watermarks to ensure that the cheque is genuine. Then we have the MICR letters, or the letters that you find towards the bottom of the cheque. These weird looking numbers with dots and dashes are called the MICR fonts, which are printed using magnetic ink, and are directly machine read, and not human read to prevent error. And the entire printing is done by a 4 color Heidelberg Printing Machine applying a 2-ton weight on each paper to ensure that the paper completely absorbs all the ink and there’s no washout.

And above and beyond that, all the cheques are properly arranged, are gum and thread bound, are perfectly perforated so that they don’t tear improperly, have enough space to write the ‘amount’ and have the account number and the account holder’s name printed.

Now take another instrument, which sits towards the other side of the spectrum; the pay-in slip. This lousy little piece of paper is printed on a paper that’s probably recycled for the nth time, which has pathetic printing, which has virtually no perforation to tear away the slip, which has no thread or gum binding, and have very little space to type in the amount that you want to deposit.

You run a complete financial check on the person who writes the cheque. Why doesn’t a bank ever verify whether the right person is depositing the money or not? Yeah I know it’s a cranky thought (who would ever deposit their hard earned money in your account just like that?!). But think of it like this: I’m a businessman who doesn’t want to give a contract to company X. Now a guy from that company, who’s hell bent on taking revenge, goes to my bank, deposits Rs.100000 and then sues me on grounds of bribery! I’m finished!

Over and above that, in a cheque, you need to write the amount in words and numbers only once, while in a pay-in slip you need to do that twice, plus also specify the combinations of the denominations used at the back of the pay-in slip!

Why do I need to go through all that torture? Why have MICR letters and nicely printed paper for yourselves and a lousy ‘tissue-paper’ish paper with no space to write anything for me?!
A cheque is a symbol of how a bank treats itself, and a pay-in slip is a symbol of how a bank treats its customer.

If you want a cheque cleared today, you need to give it to the bank before 11 a.m. But the bank will most certainly take 1 day to deposit your amount into the bank, regardless of whether you give it in the morning or evening.

If I lose a debit/credit card, I really have no way to tell the bank that I lost my debit/credit card, except to call up my friends or relative to either give me the phone number to the bank’s hotline or ask them to do the needful. But if I ever call them up to ask about a few services, they’ll run a full check to make sure that it’s me!

While withdrawing money from an ATM I need to enter a pin number and there’s also a miniature camera on the front if you’ve noticed for security sake. But if I use a debit/credit card at a Visa POS, nobody ever verifies the signature, nobody ever asks whether I’m Bhushir Mankad or some Mr.Chagan Ghelphadiya.

Where’s the security? Where’s the assurance? There’s no consistency in any of the instruments used; be it cheques, pay-in slips, debit cards, credit cards, anything.

This is what happens when the Citi never sleeps – this was what my professor said to the whole debacle. (For the ones who didn’t get the joke… forget it…)

(inspired from the Service Marketing class which I took as an extra credit course, but wasn't granted one eventually!)

I Miss...

It has been like half a month in this city-state-country, and there are many things that I miss about Dubai.

I miss the mini-kitchen of my hostel room, I miss the refrigerator where I used to stock a crate full of coke or cartons of low-fat milk using which I made coffee everyday to fill my Starbucks sipper! J

I miss my ipod which was hooked to my ears for almost all the time except for when I was in class.

I miss Al Ain Centre and Jumbo which were like my gateway to the electronics world.

I miss the DragonMart (which was normally called as ChinkiMart) which virtually stored nothing of our use.

I miss the wide ocean near the Burj Al Arab, or even the crystal blue beach of Abu Dhabi.

I miss the mid-night birthday parties where the entire floor used to ransack one room to give a hell of a birthday bash, so much that even macho dudes used to end up crying like sissies.

I so very much miss Carrefour! It was like the citadel of hypermarkets for me.

I miss all the places that I couldn't visit simply because I was underage! (I'm referring to discotheques. The minimum age barrier was 21. And I am 20! L )

I miss Music Room, where I did get a chance to get in, and where they played perhaps the best Live Rock I've ever heard.

I miss WLAN, which was popularly known as 'chori ka net' before we got our own net connection in place.

I miss QDs which was like a slick lounge bar near the ocean shore and where I perhaps had the best sheesha till now!

I miss www.dubizzle.com which is like the best place to get used goods in Dubai at freaking low prices.

I miss the 3Dhs puff at the Chill Out Zone which had mayonnaise and coriander leaves on both the ends.

I miss the unlimited coke at the Internet City Subway outlet

I miss the mallu cab guy! Well, kinda.!

I miss the Shiekh Zayed where I hitch hiked for like 6 hours.

I miss many other things! Its just not easy to describe a nation where you barged in and left within a span of 6 months. There was too much of influx. And it takes time to settle in.