KnownSense

The TATA Circle of Love.

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:43:00 +0530

Every once in a while you come across an example of crazy branding and sub product marketing mayhem. I just found one. The TATA series of communication products. I have no clue of what they offer and how their customer service is done. So here is a partial listing of the products I can see on their site(s):

- Tata Indicom

- Tata Indicom broadband

- Tata Indicom Wifi

- Tata Indocom Wimax

- Tata Docomo

- Tata Photon

- Tata Photon Plus

- Tata Indicom Extra

- Tata Photon Max

- Tata Photon on Mobile

- Tata Photon Wifi Hub

- Tata Docomo Walky

Someone please tell me all of these products roll up to the brand somehow. This reminds me of organic chemistry classes in school. I don’t care how much you are paid as marketing managers, but this kind of product confusion is criminal and needs to be called out. Simplify this! Now!

Anyways, all of these seem to have different customer care numbers as well and I have been trying to reach one of them to try and figure out how to pay a bill. I also need to figure out how to login to the customer site. Call one number and you are redirected to another and so on, until you get fed up or forget why you are speaking to some equally bewildered customer service representative.

Never ending customer care is finally here. They love you.

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

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:04:00 +0530

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.

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 22:22:00 +0530

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

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 17:50:00 +0530

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.

Wed, 18 May 2011 23:29:00 +0530

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.

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:09:00 +0530

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?

Privacy: Insert coin to ring bell.

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:24:47 +0530

Saw this interesting little vintage ad on boing boing, a doorbell that keeps marketers away by asking them to deposit a coin to ring the bell. It used to be that people valued privacy. Now though, if you value it and refuse to divulge too much online you are easily labeled a recluse, a loner, an introvert, and someone who is a “little off.”

Historically, getting through privacy has been expensive and required research and leg work. Increasingly though, for marketers, data aggregators and governments, it’s cheaper to get to know you. Here quickly are ways to profile someone you don’t know:

-Facebook and aggregated social profiles
-Friends leaking information about you, tagging
-Cookies and trackers
-IP loggers
-Location trackers
-Referrers
-Click tracking
-Comments and opinion
-News and article preferences
-Online purchases and payments

As a large firm marketer and sales guy I see profiling getting easier everyday. If done well, both companies and you benefit. But increasingly, I am troubled. I can see that with publicly available data overlays it is easy to profile someone. Once profiled and aggregated, this data becomes easier to leak as well. What troubles me is that spooks, governments, identity hackers and others have access to levels of data and overlays that can give out a lot more. Add the ability to intercept traffic or harvesting DNS queries, and you have a full profile of someone you really want to know.

What you end up getting after a detailed profiling exercise is: your age, your interests, your current location, your kids, your political leanings, your emotional triggers, your food, your current concerns, your social groups and separations, your affiliations, your reading interests, your travel plans, your financial profile and liabilities, health and allergies among others. The list goes on. Most of these are a couple of requests away. What you need to realize about the stuff you do online is that the Internet does not forget. and you do not have control of information once you release it.

From the odd-bag list above, you probably perked up a little at the fact your kids might be tracked as well. Creepy right? Not as much as what’s probably happening already. How do you know? Notice how many kids appear in TV ads these days? Children are a target audience with a disproportionately large influence on purchasing behaviour within households. If marketers are targeting children, they definitely want to know them as well. Knowing people requires data. The data makes it creepy.

Anyhow, January 28th, 2011 was data-privacy day. Take control now. Make it expensive for marketers to ring that bell.

The pay button: payment options for Indian developers

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:25:00 +0530

An Indian pay story.

The web has some inspiring stories of single developers making it big. If you’ve been coding away with the hope of striking gold someday, you’ve always faced one minor hiccup — getting paid. In India, getting rich requires that you be rich already. Ditto for payment systems, if you aren’t rich already, sorry, you are just too risky to be getting money for work. Hello, Catch 22!

So when Subbu created a simple real-time tool for project management and wanted a “pay button,” I was more than surprised. Usually this is where you give up. But then, believe it or not, Subbu had someone who wanted to pay! And so the search began.

The criteria.

The providers we looked at included Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, Paypal, CCavenue, EBS, 2Checkout, AlertPay and ZaakPay. Surprisingly though, one of them eventually worked. The requirements for a dev friendly payment system were simple:

-It had to support recurring billing
-It should allow easy integration, API, documentation, support
-It should have charges, commissions, and fees that made sense
-It should support Indian account access and withdrawals
-It should accept payments from within India
-The service needed to be cheap enough for a single developer to use without taking out a mortgage
-Finally, it was also important the service provider approve the request without a hassle or asking for “multriplicates.”

How did they fare?

Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, Paypal: Given their brand names and amount of tech they commandeer, you’d think that they would be easy, right? Wrong. These are your official sand traps. Dont spend too much time here. A couple of reasons why they probably suck right now:

-They don’t accept payments from within India.
-They don’t support recurring billing.

CCavenue: You’ve seen them a couple of times already. Maybe you paid a telephone bill online or bought a book online. They looked a little clunky at the time but yet you kept that in mind as an option to explore. They even accept USD. But…

-They don’t support recurring billing.
-Their charges are meant for enterprises. They are expensive for an average -Internet start-up.
-Their application screening takes about 3 weeks, and if you are a single dev, you are “too risky” for them.

EBS: No recurring payments, no USD, not until April 1st. That date makes me wary and brings back childhood memories of bad jokes. Move on.

2Checkout: These guys came close. But their documentation is horrible. They don’t have a single place where you can find help. Support is also not that great. Next!

ZaakPay: Desi bhais, seem dev friendly, but might be too early right now. But we have some hope with these guys and hope that they make it. Having a dev friendly setup is critical in India. The founder even managed to mail us back! Sweet.

And the winner for now is …

AlertPay: Similar to 2Checkout in that they offer recurring billing, wire transfer and you can define your items/products and a recurring period. They don’t have a joining fee. But they charge 2.5% + 12 INR to withdraw money. They charge another $15 for a wire transfer and $4 for an international cheque. But you need to check if your bank accepts international cheques. They hold your money for 14 days before releasing it your account.

API and help docs on their website were decent. You create plans on your AlertPay account and then use the code it generates to integrate it within your website. They will send you an email and a HTTP post when a customer successfully pays. They also have a cancel subscription API that you can use to programmatically. But it’s still buggy and doesn’t work. You also can’t implement an upgrade/downgrade feature from existing plans. This isn’t smooth.

They have a test mode as well that lets you test the whole e-commerce integration without an actual credit card. Once you are done with testing you can just disable the test mode go wait for the money to start trickling in.

Anyways, if you are a dev and have done something similar, let us know. I know I would love to hear similar war stories. Alternatively, if are a payment service provider, let us know if you meet the above criteria.

Wanted: Sales person with existing relationships.

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:04:00 +0530

How often have you seen an ad like that?

These ads should make you think. What is it about a sales guy with relationships that makes him/her so important to another organisation? How ethical is it to expect sales people to walk in with existing relationships? Why wouldn’t a sales person with an “existing relationship” ready to be poached end up starting his own company? Is there a certain point at which it makes sense to open your own firm? Does this mean that sales people working honestly at other firms are losers for not seeing an opportunity to bud off? This line of thinking is wrong. How many sales freelancers have you seen? Not many? There is a reason for it.

What such advertisers don’t realise is that relationships exist primarily between firms; one seeking a service and the other providing it. A star sales guy with “relationships” is not delivering anything other than a promise of service to a customer. Articulating a value proposition is very different from ensuring a flawless delivery. Satisfied customers create the “relationship.” Fulfilment is entirely a function of your delivery organisation and no amount of opportunistic sales poaching will help you deliver. Ever.

The next time you advertise a job like in the headline above, you might be advertising yourself as a company to avoid because you haven’t really understood the dynamics of being truly customer centric. You also might be advertising yourself as a firm that doesn’t care about customers, sales, ethics, or the value of delivery. Your prognosis for the long term is bad no matter how many sales guys you hire. I might as well give you some tar and feathers right now.

test

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 21:30:05 +0530

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"Mumbai’s population density is in excess of 40,000 people a sq. km. That’s 1,19,960..."

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:24:28 +0530

“Mumbai’s population density is in excess of 40,000 people a sq. km. That’s 1,19,960 people I don’t know in the 3KM trek to my office.”