The French government has announced it will rate bureaucratic red tape using a ‘Kafka index’:
France has created a “Kafka index” that measures the complexity of a project or law against its usefulness to cut red tape. The index – referring to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which describes one man’s fight against a nightmarish bureaucracy – is a scale of one to 100 measuring how many hurdles, from forms to letters or phone calls, are needed to win state permits or aid for a project.
“It is an indicator to measure as objectively as possible the most complex procedures so that we can then simplify them,” said a government spokesman. [Link]
I’d have suggested a Brazil index had I not witnessed the following exchange at a Reliance Mobile branch in Bombay last week:
Customer: I closed my account a month ago, but you billed me another thousand bucks.Rep: Saar, you have to clear an additional 80 rupee charge.
Customer: Where do I go to get the account permanently closed?
Rep: Saar, you must go to the Lilavati branch.
Customer: I’ve been going there for four days now. Every day they say their systems are down.
Rep: Saar, that is the only branch which can close accounts.
Customer: I just came from there!
Rep:
You must go there only.Customer:
I just came from there!Rep: You must go there only.
Customer: I just came from there!
Rep: You must go there only.
Me: [Trying to stifle a giggle]Customer: [Goes off on rep]
Rep: [Sits stone-faced]
And that was a private company. To be sure, these surreal scenes are not unique to India. No more than one in three accounts I set up in the U.S. are done correctly the first time. Companies still organize customer service processes around their internal departments rather than around simple customer tasks.
Citibank joins the gang. Check out:
http://www.ryze.com/posttopic.php?topicid=670369&confid=366
(Funda in brief: Citibank promised free air tickets to cardholders spending more than Rs. 30,000. People were given tickets either way off their indicative dates, or to wrong destinations. And they were made to jump hoops and do cartwheels)
Good post. Its a nightmare calling up any customer service representative. Now that they outsource most of the calls to India (like my cellular service for example) the companies delegate to the reps in India even less discretionary authority than they delegate to the reps in the US. IMO the reps in India are bigger automatons than the reps in the US.
You don’t have to look that far. Years of living in India did not prepare me for the unusual beings that work at SBC-Yahoo. And the high point came at the end of a half hour yelling contest with one of the CSRs who then proceeded with, “ma’am, you might receive a call from SBC asking if you’re satisfied with my performance…”
And if a company will suspend my connection two days before the last bill-pay date and then charge me $25 for reactivation, I’m suddenly unsure as to why bribery is an evil. Yeah, there’s still steam coming out of my ears.
yeah, I know. at least in India a judicious bribe will actually get your things done. In the US, they are still sitting there stone-faced no matter what.
We are like that only 🙂
My first experience with customer service in US was with an AOL representative. I had picked up one of those random CDs (1000 hrs dailup), used it for some 2-3 days and then called up the customer service to get it cancelled. They asked me 100 different questions and it took 15 minutes of heated exchanges to finally get my account cancelled. Indian technical-service call centers are better than the average US one (or maybe I find it better). They are able to resolve technical issues quite easily..in a methodical way.
Advice: A little Indian accent goes a long way in getting good service from these Indian call centers…do try it next time. 🙂
“you must go there only”
hahaha! heeelarious.
As brown fob said, establishing a ‘curry-connection’, in this case, accenting a few key words here and there definitely works in your favor – there’s nothing these India-based phone reps loathe more than someone with the name Hariharan Subramaniam who talks like a surfer.. “dude, what’re these charges man?!”
Privatization hasn’t made much of a difference in that sector eh?
being in customer service must be hard after all “customer is always right”…NOT
Privatization has made a lot of difference. One sector that has improved by leaps and bounds is the banking sector. A visit to a bank is a breeeze now..you don’t have to wait for hours to get your work done. Competition from private sector has also affected the government run units. Online railway tickets, online bill-payment for electricity, phone, water etc is quite common these days.
Speaking of call center operations, I had the misfortune of trying to talk to a BMI CSR while in the UK. I gave up and had to go to airport to fix my problem. I was told that the the call center was probably scottish and the combination of a cell phone connection and the brogue was a killer. I defy anybody to find an indian call center that has worse english speaking skills than the one i reached.
Advice: A little Indian accent goes a long way in getting good service from these Indian call centers…do try it next time. 🙂
they dont even mind desi languages! I had major problems with new laptop and called tech help, ended up with a Chennai help center guy; we ended up chatting away in our mother tongues while he kept asking me to change stuff and reboot etc. So almost an hour later, things began to work, but meanwhile he’d updated me on weather, politics and local happenings. I even asked him if it was ok not to talk in English, but he was perfectly fine with it.
yeah, even the “state” banks, notorious for their red tape, have started becoming more efficient.
I dont think the incident narrated by manish is merely red tape. It is also squeezing-customer-out-of-last-rupee tactic whose equivalent here is your “try our program free for 30 days, but we will automtically charge u after that if u dont cancel”; private banks in india often indulge in almost-hidden, fine-print based unethical money grabbing.
Hmm… An instant where the Indian accent does NOT cut tension.
oh definitely true! some unintended pluses of globalization. the reps are exceptionally nice and at least try a little harder to be helpful.
@gunda, i like to think it is not antagonism against surfer-dude hariharan subramaniam, but rather something nicer towards always-spelling-out-his-name venkataharan sheshashayithirunarayanan :). but you may be right of course. and no, not my name.
1.SBC yahoo is the bane of my existence….i have actually dedicated the rest of my life to spreading ill-well and malice against that moronic evil…..till day i refuse to have a landline because of my experience with them.
2.privatization does appear to have made some change back in india(the post about banking,reservationt etc) but then again,a 100 million people were bred on 60 years of bureacratic inertia,please do pardon them if instances like the one mentioned crop up from time to time…..and yes,i hate to say it coz it is after all unethical BUT a few palm-greasing techniques and you can have anything done,anything!
3.regarding the call-center,my experience was a bit different…..the moment the creature on the other end figured i was indian,they would start being patronzing like’so,how do u like it in the US sir’ or ‘do u know this call is being routed through ahmadabad’..i was like,thats so unprofessional,i called you to have my pc fixed and not to sing ‘saare jahan se achcha’……. one of my cousins back home is human resources consultant with GE overseeing the training of call-center workers,i told him to maybe incorporate it in their training as well……just because the person on the other end is indian doesnt mean he is your chuddie-buddie…..anyone else feel the same way or was i being a high-strung ass with my fellow countrymen??
Had a similar issues with my linksys wireless router cust rep. The man patronized me and asked me why I was doing the configuration and my husband wasn’t. I think he thought that being guju like me gave him the right to be my ‘moto bhai’.
My all time favorite experience a project manager for a major american insurance company. The tech dept is outsourced and in India (but naturally) and despite being told that I was the only project manager in charge, the grudgy My Ranganathan Swamy always insisted upon speaking to someone ‘highest up’. This was worse then the chuddie-buddie issue because he was taking out his chauvinistic grudge on me. Needless to say, the american powers that be had to look into stuff.
I get call centre reps phoning me from India, but mispronouncing my (perfectly common Indian) name! Why? Is it the accent coaching they receive? Are they instructed to mispronounce Indian names in the same way other people would? I don’t get it.
Technophobicgeek: yeah, I know. at least in India a judicious bribe will actually get your things done
Reminds me of a line from the book I am reading – Shantaram by Gregory Roberts The dishonest bribe is the same in every country, the honest bribe is India’s alone So true!
I can’t believe no one has brought up the cheese shop.
Thanks, Saheli 🙂 I especially liked this part:
Customer: It’s not much of a cheese shop, is it? Wenslydale: Finest in the district! Customer: (annoyed) Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please. Wenslydale: Well, it’s so clean, sir!
Reminds me of that infamous telephonic exchange between a hotel guest and room-service, at a hotel in Asia, which was recorded and published in the Far East Economic Review: