Just Another Customer

In Rambo 3, our man Rambo is initially found living among monks after renouncing war. Rambo has to unlearn a lot there and tries to but as most of the rest of the movie shows, and luckily for America, he still knows a lot about killing. Which he does.

In school, esp CBSE and state ones here in India, we are indoctrinated early and relentlessly that MORE is better. More pages to answer the question, more words and more verbosity gets you the higher grade.

With this lesson firmly implanted into our heads, already crammed with other stupid lies and fallacies, we are sent into the real world.

And lo and behold! The world is the very opposite of what we were told (As recent tweet cuttingly observes, ‘Reality is against Indian culture’). And now we have to do a Rambo and learn the very opposite of what we know and also unlearn everything we do. And lesson #1 is that Brevity trumps Verbosity any day. And the agency, manager or company that is able to present it’s case quickly and sensibly is going to beat the competition.

TED talks are designed to be no more than 20 minutes and they are THE preeminent platform to disseminate important messages today.

Twitter is 140 characters. max And they influence so much of culture and policy decisions now.

Guy Kawasaki rightly advises people seeking VC funding to limit their presentations to 10 slides and cap the minimum font size in each slide to 30. And limit the pitch to 20 minutes.

Our emails, meetings and idea pitch all have to get shorter and slicker. Schools teach and reward the opposite. The real world punishes most of the behaviors and responses the schools teach you and your kid. Most of the teachers in our high schools and colleges are failed washouts who actually deserve their pittance salaries and who would last about 1 week in the real world. There is a reason the biting saying ‘Those who can’t do, teach’ caught on.

Don’t let school ruin your kids or your own chances.

Today the elevator pitch is the ONLY pitch opportunity you probably are going to get. In the 20th century, the most important and scarce commodity was capital. In the 21st, I think it will be ATTENTION. Because there is so many agencies that demand it from the very limited stock a person has to offer. So keep the message about you, your company, your product pared down to the bare essential and if that means you have to cut to the bone, just stop whining and start sharpening the butcher knife.

Samsung makes great products and it’s ‘reaction’ time probably competes with the humming bird. You email them and they will call you back in less than an hour. And if an engineer is needed to attend to your Samsung appliance, he will take less time than the ambulances and cops in India to turn up at your place. Alas, Samsung’s noble intentions towards their customer base is let down by poor selection of authorized service centers and reps who are experts at ripping the customer off and sullying the good brand.

The new iPad is amazing and the display helps your jaw meet the floor in record time. But what I think it does best is not that display thing Apple boasts abt. I think the device very subtly elevates, without you even realizing it, to becoming sublime and invisible. Only the Amazon Kindle has managed this trick earlier. This ‘flow’ state happens when your engagement with the information on the device becomes so pleasurable and intuitive and intense, the device literally just disappears into the background. Flipboard and Skitch apps on the iPad have done that for me especially well. The Game has changed.

BlackBerry is dying and in less than 2 years will be dead as an independent company and will be bought off by one of the technology goliaths ( Google, Microsoft, HP) and I hope someone then writes a good book on the rise and fall of this once mighty RIM empire and what hubris destroyed it.

The game at a Govt service provider (Air India, USA DMV, Municipal Services) is to start with low standards and try for lower. Bet on them. The odds are they will win.

The trouble with Indian customer service providers, esp. call center reps, domestic or international oriented is they equate great customer service with obeisance. No! No! No! Adding a million “please” and “Saaar” and “Thaankk you Thaankk you” will not hold a candle to being able to listen and give straight answers or solutions to the query. Or saying you can’t without the sugar overkill. You want to keep the AHT low. Believe me, so does the customer.

Hierarchy trumps quality and strength of argument at all mediocre companies. Esp that don’t know they are. It is also the canary in the coal mine in the ones that are sliding down from the top. BlackBerry RIM I am sure experienced this.

The TATA Motors advertisement and marketing team probably were taken to a BMW factory with the BMW banners removed and fooled into thinking it was a TATA factory. Nothing else explains the gap between their bluster in the ads and the reality of the turd models they shit out year on year.

Offsites are such a waste of time and money.

Bold prediction: A white collared firm in India that introduces a ‘Dogs allowed to work !!’ +’NO dress code here’ + ‘No limit on leaves taken’ will NEVER go bankrupt. There are many layers of smart phycology in those 3 rules. Someone should institute them to reap plum first mover advantage.

People who really know, understand and smartly use twitter are really ahead of the majority in the quality of information they are getting exposed to. Follow @theatlantic or @openculture to understand what I am talking about. And get onboard and get an edge.

Those of you who roam and graze on the vast manicured greens that is the sensible websites of the internet keep hearing about the power of stories.

They CEO of Mozilla says that’s his CHIEF role as CEO. He says “…A lot of people say the number one job of the CEO is to keep money in the bank, or the number one job is to be strategic and the number one job is recruiting. That may be a true, but when I was at Mozilla the activity I did mostly was to tell the story–tell the story simply, understandably over and over and over again. “

Collecting and narrating good stories about a firm’s product, service and customers is a powerful tool and a very good habit with high ROI.

The latter because it FORCES you to have a cogent narrative. Like what are you really about ? what’s the DNA of this firm ? What’s guiding us ?

Alas, most firms don’t do it, considering it a ‘wtf’ idea at best.

But then, if your firm does, that’s a really sharp arrow in your quiver.

So I suggest, just do it. That btw was the punch line to Nike’s narrative a decade ago.

Let’s pretend you did sit with your team and collected some great stories. What to do with it ? Use it in all comms. esp with employees. Want a crazy idea ? Here goes — Whenever someone calls your helpline and the wait time is X mins, what if instead of torturing the sap on the line with elevator music and the insincere ‘your call is very important to us’, you played a story on the IVR lasting those X mins. (So a 60 sec wait time, narrates a 50 sec story, 3 mins wait time narrates a 170 secs story. You get the idea no?)

No doubt the tough part is collecting great sincere stories and narrating them in a manner that engages.

But if you did….oh my god!…you’ll leave them in the damn dust.

When you sell a commodity-like product, price competition is usually fierce. Think airline seats, insurance, hotel rooms.

It pays to be the low cost operator. Lowest is better.

Marketing in this environment is inherently an evidence of optimism by the senior team. When you are marketing for these type of products, you are fighting the evidence and the instincts of the majority consumer. And if this is the case, why not use that available pool of money for something better ? There MUST be superior ways to get more bang for your buck. Why not USE all the money to set up more customer service lines, monitor the conversations about the brand online, or (gasp!) participate and control it.

I think lowest cost operator reputed for GREAT customer service, in the long marathon, will beat a low cost operator with memorable ads.

Any money diverted from customer service to marketing should be scrutinized more sharply by the bean counters at finance and by the CEO versus expenses related to T&E and Headcount (traditionally the ones that was closely monitored)

Radical – The CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of a commodity-like product should be only moved into that role after he has done a 3 year stint in Customer Service. That’ll really dampen her urge to promise the moon to customers when he knows the team in the kitchen can’t deliver that and will face the flak when they can’t.

India.

Sometimes I think, like the Matrix, this country is a stimulation training program that is designed by a cruel programmer to train the inserted student in selfishness, venality and becoming someone with nil-empathy.

Nothing else better explains the horrific phenomena that is this country and the 1.3 billion in it.

Moral gangrene meets spiritual bankruptcy.

OK. That was the acerbic rant. Done.

Here is the idea.

Have you heard about the term ‘Conscription’ ?

Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service.

Finland and Israel do it.

What if India had conscription but NOT for military service but something far more noble, needed and nicer : Teaching.

What if the govt amended the constitution and made all jobs open to ONLY those people who proved they spent 2 years teaching.

Think about the net positive benefit to both the teacher and the millions of illiterate students.

Why not ? What is the downside versus the obvious upsides? I don’t see many but open to thoughts.

"I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy"

— said that bearded Nobel winning poet dude from Bengal

Sometimes seemingly random data points helps the nuanced observer understand the observed entity better than all the glossy brochures, the slick ‘About us’ section in the website or the unasked 53 slides presentation from the over keen, laughably under-informed HR team on induction day.

Let’s take hiring and firing at a firm as the starting equation.

In most firms we see, hiring is a quick and easy exercise. You make a case, interview some people and hire the bloke your gut votes for.

Firing is a long, painful, extended process with HR acting as the living embodiment of a Indian Govt Department that has won untold medals for ‘suicides-on-account-of-dealing-with’.

The Americans justify the latter, saying (correctly I suspect) that in the nation that invented the frivolous lawsuit and ambulance chasing lawyers, you have to ensure termination is not too easy. Ally McBeal details why.

But here in India, the land of the 46-year-court-cases, why the delay and new bride shyness about booting the laggards ?

Here, HIRING should be long, detailed and thorough and firing should be easier. Not easy, EASIER, when the employee is in the bottom percentile. The DECISION to fire should be long, detailed and thorough but the act and the process should take the length of a typical over acted SRK movie (=all his movies = 4 hours ?)

The ration between days on average taken to hire an employee and days taken to fire an employee probably gives the astute observer a needed data point to understand if he is dealing with a dynamic workplace or a stodgy firm for ‘retired’ workers.

Firms where the hiring cycle is MUCH longer versus time taken to terminate is a place where the word ‘Talent management’ is taken seriously by HR and the Senior team. A company where the opposite is reality (= most firms today) is likely to be a place where HR is a cushy job for obese fugly ‘failed govt school teacher’ types who strayed into the private industry forest and decided to squat there in a easy part of the woods.

Hire slow. Fire fast. Prosper.