KnownSense

Updated. Why Airtel should fail and why it needs a maths lesson.

I’ve been having an ongoing customer service nightmare with Airtel for the past week. I’ve done the back and forth with them on their customer service numbers and via twitter for at least a week. No resolution yet and I feel this company now needs to fail for the sake of all its customers and the pain they feel. Despite being clear, despite showing them whats wrong, despite taking them through the paces of resolving the issue I get no resolution.

It was an easy error for them to fix. I upgraded from a 10GB limit to a 30GB limit. Somewhere in the back end of this company, some systems aren’t getting updated. So, on the 19th I get capped. My connection speeds drop from 2Mbps to 256 Kbps. They tell me that I’ve exceeded my quota of 10 GB, even while they confirm I have a 30GB connection.

I ve done all I could. I’ve shown them my meter readings from their billing site (when it works and another story by itself.), and told them they have made a mistake. 80% of 30GB is not 10GB.

I have no hope. However, the bills arrive on time, with calls pestering one to pay. To hell with these companies. Airtel Sucks.

Airtel, please hire people after a basic IQ test.

Morons Morons Morons … is all I can mutter all day.

Update

So they finally managed to get their act together. But it took some pushing. Pushing them to acknowledge their side of the error via mail took some time. Then I wanted discounts, which they agreed to and I insisted on an email to state this.

And then I got the printed bill. Everything was wrong again and I was unable to loginto their billing and payment system as usual. Wait another 3 days and I login, the online bill was the correct amount. So there, I paid it off and I hope my woes with Airtel are done.

Key takeaways:

• 1. Their twitter channel is staffed by slightly more intelligent staffers. Use it.
• 2. Ask for email acknowledgements for everything, summarize your discussion regarding discounts etc and send it to them.
• 3. Check your online bills rather than the printed ones. The printed ones suck, even for the trees.

The hobbyist coder and the wage scrounger.

Many years ago, I got booted out of a computer center at my university. It didn’t feel good. The reasoning the university staff gave me wasn’t satisfactory either. Apparently I wasn’t allowed to use the computers if it wasn’t on my course syllabus. That didn’t stop me though, I went at night. Institutional attitudes towards learning have not changed one bit in all those years. Now, I see laments by HR teams all over that say only x% of graduates are employable.

I call bullshit. It’s because you don’t know what you want or that you overlook the types that might help you change. The hiring types in many firms are horrendous at identifying the right types today. You should read though a couple of job requirements online and tell me if you are inspired by the insipid job descriptions.

Makes me think how I go about hiring people. I know everybody has a method and one man’s method is another’s madness. My method? I check for passion. I always speak to candidates to figure out if they have any hobbies that were not part of the syllabus. If yes, I go ahead and listen to check for passion. The types that didn’t work out for me have been the too-studious types, the donation payers, the ones with degrees they accumulated because it paid well, and the ones that didn’t do a thing beyond their prescribed text books. They are good at impressing the boss with their PPTs but faced with an innovative problem, have failed.

I’ve been able to split coder applicants into two types as well: the hobbyist coder and the wage scrounger — and I can tell you these distinct attitudes make a difference. Manging the hobbyists has been difficult especially if you are a largish company with expansive bureaucracies, documentation, repeated testing and process overloads. Hobbyists thrived on problems, looked to optimize obsessively, cracked silly gripes, created new workflows, and generated new ideas. The downside always has been retaining them. I’ve always understood why they quit.

The wage scroungers are the guys who get your mundane work done, but it’s difficult to get them to innovate. Don’t expect doodles of bulbs on the white board. If you have a transactional process, hire them. They crave the mundane, and irritating politics and credit whoring seems to be their only respite. They tend to rise fast and they aren’t the types that quit easily. Consequently, you will find them warming chairs at decision making levels in companies. Companies that don’t innovate. I sometimes think that the reason why Indian firms aren’t known to create products are for the same reason that you have the hobby/wage divide — a lack of passion.

Even worse, firms tend to push out the mould breakers, problem solvers, and the thinkers more often than not. Organizational structures do not support these personality types well. In a monoculture of ideas it is easy to end up being weed.

Anyways, assuming you are working in a monoculture someplace, I hope you are writing down your ideas, and working on it in the meanwhile. Scrounge for now while you ideate. Jump someday, but dump those PPTs.

For anyone in HR reading this, give those outlier candidates a chance, you might discover a thing or two about how simple creative ideas can transform a workplace. Also, write better job descriptions.

ISP crapspeak

I’ve had to deal with a couple of ISPs lately. Here are a couple of pointers for cutting through the stuff ISPs try to sell you and a couple of words you need to be aware of.

Red words:

Upto: This usually means that the ISP can get away with providing vastly inferior service as long as they can show you that they can theoretically send you data from one of their in-house servers at the “upto” speed. Why does it suck, you want to know. Well, most connections start off good, but slowly deteriorate until you get the theoretical minimum under the plan which is 0Mbps.

Capital B vs Small b: 2 MBps is not the same as 2Mbps. Repeat that after me; 2 MBps is not the same as 2Mbps. Can’t say more. Most ISPs are careful about claims on their websites, but their marketing and field agents do not have a clue if it’s byte or bit and will sell you a MBps plan while the company will give you a Mbps plan. Strangely, they don’t like it when you pay the Bill/1024.

Bad billing: Ask for SLAs upfront and don’t be afraid to call up and ask for discounts once you put in a complaint for no service. An ISP I used sent me a bill for 6 more months after I stopped service and gave their equipment back. I even got a final all clear receipt. Despite that, I got collection calls 8 months later for the 6 months of service I didn’t use.

Coverage area:Do not buy a 3G dongle without asking the ISP to show that it works in your area at the advertised speeds. Showroom speeds don’t matter. A month of no service later, you will be stuck with the spectrum’s license fees.

I find most ISPs in India terrible, even the big names. They do seem to be trying to improve, but continue to fail on the field. Any other tips?

Scientific Corruption HowTo.

I am assuming you are a minister or a senior public servant and in need of some quick advice on how to mange the large sums of money that seem to want to flow your way. Ok, let’s begin. It’s pretty simple really.

• -Register a company
• -Setup shareholders
• -Ask people wanting to pay you to become shareholders in the firm
• -Deliver your part of the deal.

Sit back, relax and marvel at the ingenuity of it all. For more bang for the buck, run a newspaper or TV station with the money. Even better, start a political party, adopt a bleeding heart cause and promise general largesse once you are elected. After all who cares for the taxpayer anyway.

Product design: Go beyond the normal.

I’ll tell you a story. 15 years ago, I used to be a writer. One of my first bosses would catch me if I did shoddy work and ask me to spend more time on my stories. I never knew how he did it. Until one day he told me that he just searches for double spaces in my copy. Yeah, double spaces, like this “  .” Ok, so I learned the fact the if you don’t pay attention to the very last little detail of your product, no matter how strong your product, it still feels half finished and potential customers will delay clicking “buy.” Anybody in sales will tell you that a delayed sale is a lost sale or at least a sale with increased costs. As a start-up, you don’t need that happening.

Even the big guys make mistakes. A lot of product companies are suddenly getting things wrong. Shorter product cycles, the extended nature of the supply chain and partner credit across large manufacturing keeps new products coming out faster and faster. Risk is increasingly spread out to suppliers and in some cases, customers. It’s the nature of the market today, failing often, succeeding once and scaling up the success. Some companies seem to succeed by failing, often at the cost of the customer and others make sure they never fail the customer.

Some good case studies would include:

• -Tata motors for the Nano failure, and a whole lack of attention to detail.
• -LinkedIn for their half assed attempts at selling you a premium account.

Let’s look at both for vicarious reasons.

The Tata Nano: There was hype, there was pride, there was waiting, and filling forms in triplicate but there were not many sales. Puzzling! Didn’t make sense to me either. Was it the shape? It was not remarkable looking. It did look like a little bar of used sunlight soap though. Was it the interior? Nothing stand-out there either. I didn’t understand it until until I heard it. It was so un-car like when I heard it for the first time, I really didn’t understand how a product manager could approve it in the first place. It’s an auto-rickshaw in disguise. This attitude just exemplifies the Tata story for me till date. Test it on the customer, and see if it works. It truly is the people’s car. This is why you typically don’t see huge queues outside Tata showrooms for their first time launches of home stable vehicles. Meanwhile I feel sad for the suppliers and the retooling they will have to do.

The LinkedIn Premium account. Everyday they keep restricting you even more. So finally one day, you end up upgrading to a paid account, and then suddenly you don’t see what you paid for. No visual indicators, no indicators to show you the premium features on the main screens. Nothing. You end up thinking it’s a waste of money and un-subscribe and then you miss little things, and you have no idea what it is. I only wish they could highlight the damn premium features for paid users.

The exception: The one company you won’t see making mistakes like this is probably Apple. Unfair comparison, I know, but I can’t help it. Apple’s launches are so pixel perfect that minor problems end up being big news stories. When you have a CEO who practices his presentations for a week and lavishes his attention to detail, you have products that make customers queue outside.

Meanwhile, our Tata Nano is dying a slow death, in the sidelines. The sad lonely death of a promise un-met. Similarly, I see far too many start-ups with muggy design, chopped up photos, smudged graphics, silly interface mistakes and a lack of attention to detail that makes it seem like it’s temporary. It just seems like they are passing the risk to you, the potential customer.

What do you think? What other case studies do you think are relevant? What little things do you notice? Do you have quick tests for quality as well?