Move over to the Morning Haha

Come on over to my new, old blog here: 

http://themorninghaha.blogspot.com/

More ire vented!

This blog post will take you through the 3 worst service providers in India. From simply bad value for your money to service providers who are better classified as purse-snatchers, this post has it all. Read on!

#3: Bad Value for Money – Airtel: I have used mobile service providers across 4-5 major cities in India. For most cases my preference has been Hutch (now Vodafone) and not Airtel. Only recently have I decided to take an Airtel postpaid connection. The difference was clear from Day 1. Little things make a customer feel happy. With Hutch, on subscription I received a set of discount coupons at restaurants, retail stores etc; with Airtel, nothing. Things began their downward slide from there on. The call centre for Airtel had an amazing feature by which you could never get to speak to an officer, but rather be looped back to the ‘welcome to Airtel’ menu after a series of long and painful entries. Call drop rates are close to 100%, which means almost all STD calls I make get unceremoniously dropped after some time. First time connection is a near impossibility. It is either a ‘Network Busy’ message or a call that is only one-way. There are a host of other issues as well.

Airtel may be focused more on advertising than on service right now. Justifiably so, the phenomenal market growth demands that Airtel have top of the mind recall. It is only when growth tapers out when Airtel perhaps will turn their attention to its existing customer base.

#2: Not worth their weight in toilet paper – ICICI Lombard: I am basing this on a series of calls I had with the ICICI Lombard call centre. Before leaving for an overseas trip I had availed of the ‘services’ of an ICICI Bank Travel card. There was an extremely steep joining charge of $150. For this they provided travel insurance from ICICI-Lombard against loss or delay of baggage (This was mentioned in the brochure that came along with the card). Unfortunately, that is exactly what had happened. I decided to call up ICICI bank and they routed me to ICICI-Lombard insurance desk (and rightly so). The ICICI-Lombard insurance help desk had no clue that insurance was being offered with the travel card. I read out the brochure to them. Talk of on-the-job-training. This is the latest, have the customers train the employees. They cheerfully agreed to forward the call to the relevant department. And lo and behold I was talking to ICICI Bank. Few more agonizing calls later I got the ICICI-Lombard people to agree that travel insurance was their domain. They agreed rather reluctantly to send me a claim form. My friend with the exact same problem called up after hearing that sense had prevailed with ICICI-Lombard. But his joy was only too short-lived. He was asked to visit the Lombard office in Mumbai. Yeah that is the whole point of having call centers! Other friends who called in with the same problem after this got other responses like ‘We don’t have travel insurance!’ or ‘We cannot process this, this is to be done by ICICI bank!’ I shudder to think of them selling life or medical insurance.

#1: Purse-Snatchers – Reliance Communications: This is the pits! You have officially entered the sulfur pits of hell! Trouble started from the moment I signed on the dotted line for a Reliance NetConnect data card. The connection was given in someone else’s name. Now that was a first! Therefore I never got the bills in the first place. Then one fine day without warning I was barred from using their 1-kbps internet connection. I made the payment through their website and was told that they would be able to restore the connection after the payment reflected on their website. And that would take an amazingly mind-numbing 48 hours to show. And you thought online payments were faster than 1980’s money orders? Think again. Since I could not do anything, I roughed the 48 hours out. But the money order got lost in cyberspace. I had to wait for 5 days before Reliance finally restored my connection. I gave up trying to convince the call centre that I had made the payment. The website still does not reflect the payment made after 2 months. Neither does it have any information on bills. I would definitely like to meet the fishmonger who manages the website.

I am usually a patient person; I vent my displeasure out through blog-posts. Now you can’t get milder than that. But just the other day I waited for 25 minutes then disconnected the call to the help line because I was still on hold. I wanted to call up and find out why I was experiencing lower than the usual 1-kbps speeds. The speeds were in the range of 5 bytes per second. Another first! I could visualize a hapless employee on the reliance internet gateway furiously typing 0s and 1s into his terminal after the physical link went down.

This is the story of the so called service providers in India. I am sure many of the few readers of this blog would also have similar ghost stories to share! See you on the next brand bashing party!

The curious incident of a brand and a trek!

Hello and welcome back to the Brand-Bashing forum. As a part of our endeavor to educate consumers about the dangers of brands*; we bring to you this scathing episode on brand “Reebok”. It also has a sub-plot of an overweight IT guy trudging up a hill thrown in for the laughs.

Well it all started when someone like me who feeds on rice and potatoes and have never walked more than a few kilometers in my entire life decided to take on a trek of 30 kilometers. No! I can’t explain why I had this rather overambitious urge.

It was a trek, organized by some of my esteemed colleagues, to a place called Rajmachi. It is a fort situated on top of a sheer cliff surrounded by lush green woodlands of the Western Ghats. Jolly nice place to be visiting (On a helicopter).

I was proudly wearing my new Reebok sneakers when I started this trek. I was proudly thinking about this post when I ended the trek. Almost as soon as the trek started the left shoe gave way. The sole almost came off and was attached to the shoe only at the heel.

The difficulty level of the trek just went up a few notches. Reebok shoes are designed to test the limits of us extreme athletes. Come on, anyone can trek with good shoes. However, don’t chuck your Reeboks out the window yet. They make real good shoe laces. I used the shoe laces to tie the runaway sole to the shoe. Soulfully, I continued on my trek, even the wonderful mist covered mountains failed to cheer my soul. (You will encounter more of these bad sole/soul jokes)

Soon enough the whole sole came off. Then it was like skating and trekking at the same time. The trek went uphill from there, in more ways than one. Rains pitched in too. On the way back the unthinkable happened. The other shoe (Did I tell you they were Reeboks?) gave way. Body and Soul … err sole of the other shoe separated. For me, it was a challenge to keep my body and soul together.

Did I mention Reebok makes awesome shoe-laces? I used them to tie up the other shoe as well. They looked as good as new. I somehow made it back to the motorized transport (read: bus) helped by happy thoughts of steaming rice and potatoes.

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode. The moral of the story is: If you want to buy really expensive but fabulous shoe-laces pick up a pair of Reebok sneakers.

* A cow on a typical Texas ranch can also tell us about the dangers of a brand!

World’s most disgusting advertisement!

Yup, this is probably one of my most disgusting posts ever. Not that the others have smelled of pine trees. (The association with pine fragrance is going to be clear soon)

This post is on the Harpic advertisement that used to be ‘aired’ (pun intended) on national TV. The advert story runs somewhat like this. A visually perturbed Roshan Abbas armed with a microphone and a camera crew, barge into a Gujju household asking a star-struck-wide-eyed housewife whether she has been having problems cleaning her potty. (Does this ring a bell? If not, you have blocked it successfully!)

Well, what happens next will make you throw-up your meal from kindergarten. Roshan then barges into the toilet. (He must have been paid a ransom to do this) The camera focuses on the most revolting yellow-stained-dirty-godforsaken-radioactive potty that you have seen in your … sorry you would have never seen such a monstrosity. (Hell, you could even smell it!)

Roshan then offers to pour Harpic into one half of the pot. (You begin to feel sorry for Roshan by now!) And hey presto! We have a potty with a split-personality staring you in the face. Most of us are choking on our vomits by this time now.

An amazing fact about this advert was that it used to appear on TV exactly when you would have sat down with your dinner. Thus helping the cause of millions of dieters around the country. Well, the advert ends with Roshan ‘passing’ (pun intended) comments on how good Harpic is.

Well, I have unsuccessfully attempted to collect pictures of the advert from the net, but it looks like other people too have blocked this heinous creation from their memory. Very recently, there was a hue-and-cry over an Amul Macho ad. What about the psychological consequences of ads such as these? I for one have been scarred for life having watched this!!

Global Warming?

Well this is one topic on which being objective would be near impossible. In all the debate that is raging across the world, I find that there are two highly polarized factions. There is a group of ‘Global warming doomsday conspirators’ and also a set of critics who believe it is nothing more than rumor-mongering. The doomsday conspirators may be starting to gain an edge over the critics given the Inter-governmental Panel of Climate Change report.

I will only try to bring out a few facts here. Hard Facts!

1. CO2, which is one of the many green houses gases, has increased from 250 ppm, during the pre-industrial levels, to 400 ppm. This has been termed ‘anthropogenic green house gas emissions’. In other words we have helped nearly double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Models are ineffective in predicting what final increase in average temperature it will have. But it is an established fact that, there will be an effect, most likely a warming. How much? We can’t say!

2. Given the enormous effort required to reduce the emissions, this is likely to continue. This means we will keep on adding to the 400 ppm. There are ways in which the CO2 is sequestered, but the increase would be despite that.

Given the fact that we are changing the Equilibrium, we call nature, it is therefore established that there will be consequences. Are these consequences going to be as grave as the doomsday conspirators are making it out to be? I think not. I also don’t think that they will be as mild as critics say it will be.

There will be consequences.

Do read up this page on Global Warming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Thundering Typhoons!

No, I don’t get a kick out of using the revered Captain’s expletives. And this article is not about the Captain either. This is about how to increase sales revenues if you are a mobile service operator. It would certainly not make a good title to the blog!

Nevertheless I have come up with a brilliant set of strategies to increase revenues of a mobile service operator. So if you are one, keep reading. If not, keep reading, just in case you become one in the future.

1. Increase call-drop rates. Thus, say, I intended to speak to someone for 5 minutes. Assume the rates are 1 Re per minute. If there are no call drops, then the billed amount is Rs. 5. If there is one drop, and there are 2 calls of 2 minutes 30 seconds each, then the billed amount is Rs. 6. Simple yet brilliant.

2. Single-way calls. Introduce calls in which only one way communication happens. This would mean the caller would have to reconnect. But then a computer can connect the caller through a 2-way call after a preset number of attempts.

3. Loop-back call-centers. Have automated call-centers which loops you back to the original menu ("Welcome to the helpline...") after a set of long painful menu choices and cumbersome entries. Save on your call-center wage bill.

4. A variation of this strategy would be to preset the choice of help-line language to something that the customer is not familiar with. Thus a Punjabi user could have a Tamil help-line.

5. False billing. Slip in a few charges here and there. Something as innocuous as a few ring-tone downloads or special sms-es will almost always be overlooked.

6. Sell the phone numbers of customers to banks selling credit cards. Boy they would lap it up.

7. Complicate the process for the customer. For example, to have roaming deactivated ask the customer to go to the sales office in Timbuktu and submit a hand written application to the tribal chieftain.

8. Decrease connection quality. The caller therefore, will have to repeat what he is saying, increasing call times.

Now I only need to wait for some mobile operator to read my blog. I can sell this to him and make a bunch out of it.

Blistering Barnacles!

"Billions of Bilious Blue Blistering Barnacles" is my favourite quote !

It is the simplicity of the character of Captain Haddock that has immense appeal for me. He enjoys the small things in life. He does what he loves to do. Has a strong sense of duty towards his friends. He looks at the world through the eyes of a child. It is this innocence that we are missing in our lives. This is what complicates things for us, to a large extent unnecessarily. For me that very precisely sums up my attitude towards life also.

Keep things simple, straight and effective. Of course the two of us share a liking for a certain beverage also. :)