Early last week I was grappling with a troublesome situation. My Honda City’s hypothecation to Kotak got over and I got a NOC from them that I can submit to my RTO and get new set of papers for the car. I had all the papers ready – RC book, driving license, emission certificate… but did not have the insurance papers.
I had given the cheque for insurance renewal to Bharti Axa in the end of April since my insurance expires on May 2nd week. But it was the 4th week of May and my new insurance papers hadn’t reached me yet.
The trouble is, Kotak’s NOC is valid for 2 months and I had completely forgotten to submit it at the RTO. So now I had a week to submit it (last Friday was the last day) and Bharti Axa hadn’t sent me the insurance renewal.
I… – no, I did not tweet about it – sent a mail detailing everything on Sunday night, via their official site’s complaints form. I also called up Bharti Axa on Monday and was told that my payment hasn’t registered in their system and that they would send the new insurance papers in about 5-7 working days!
I then lost my cool and gave them a piece of my mind. I also – I’m ashamed of it, but you gotta do what you gotta do – threatened them that I will blog about the service deficiency since I had paid up much earlier and the insurance wasn’t renewed even after the expiry of my older one. I also told them I’ll ‘go to the media’, whatever that meant. I was very tempted to do all this (or most of it) rightaway, but I knew it was completely unfair to do them before giving them a chance to make things right. And my tweeting is not going to solve te problem for me anyway.
Thankfully, after another round of shouting on Tuesday, they were magically able to reduce the ‘5 to 7 working days’ to just 2, and I got the soft copy of my renewed insurance last Wednesday evening.
But it is just terribly unfortunate that this required 2 days of shouting. And funnily, the mail I sent on Sunday got me a response only on Tuesday evening, that too asking me for more details, with no resolution in sight!
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The 2nd instance was interesting. Last Wednesday I needed to be in Delhi for a meeting. As always, I had asked my office travel guys to book me on IndiGo. I was just starting my ride to the airport at 5am when I got an sms from IndiGO that my 7:30am flight has been rescheduled to 11am! That would be late for my meeting – so, I anyway headed to the airport and got myself a ticket at the 7am Jet Airways flight. I also asked the IndiGo counter folks to cancel my ticket – I was asked to do that via my office travel agent and I mailed them promptly.
As I got into my flight, I also tweeted this.
No, that was not to shame IndiGo because I know that they can’t do anything besides informing me of a reschedule much in advance. I did not expect any response from IndiGo either.
But, there were a few missed calls that after noon which I was able to attend to them only late in the evening as I was heading back to the airport. They were from IndiGo office and the reception couldn’t connect me to the exact person who may have made those calls. I let it be.
I then got a mail to my personal ID about the calls and apologizing for the rescheduled flight. And an offer to refund, understandably.
What was interesting is that they had got all the relevant details needed to reach me and resolve the issue from one innocuous seeming tweet. That includes my mail ID (personal one – have no idea how they got it; don’t recall giving them this one, but I may have… really not sure), my trip details and a resolution to that.
This is something we (as in when I was in Flipkart) did very efficiently at Flipkart too. The intention was always to ensure that every communication takes the conversation ahead and not merely act with a placeholder statement. This meant we spent some extra time finding the order ID of the person who is complaining on Twitter (without giving any details) through a few methods – check his/her bio for a real name and search that real name in the Flipkart database; if there is no real name, check for the product in question and see if there are details from that where we can get the order ID; if there is nothing like that, try the handle with random email IDs to see if we can somehow trace the order ID. The intention was always to ensure that asking the customer the order ID was the last resort, that too as a DM. And to have a solution before we can enter the conversation.
Exceptions included instances when there is a really annoyed customer and when things are going viral/haywire rapidly. In such cases, a placeholder response to merely note that we have seen the issue and are working on it becomes essential. In all other cases, I have seen that customers really appreciate the extra effort we had taken and the fact that one single tweet resulted in a solution.
I see that IndiGo has a similar system in place and I’m really glad with the way they handled it.
It’s ironical to see 2 extremes of customer service instances in the same week, though, to be fair, the person I was shouting at (at Bharti Axa) did keep up his promise and managed to deliver my insurance on Wednesday, the deadline I had given him.