Your card will reach you in three days’ time. That’s Sushank, a manager at a call centre of one of India’s largest credit card providers, a tie-up between a global leader in financial services and its Indian counterpart. The tone is efficient, businesslike. You could even accuse it of being customer-friendly. Except that it’s not — the difference between the tone and the action, the promise and the delivery is well. My problem began, currently is, and perhaps will continue to be for as long as I stay with this company, around something as complex, as intricate, as convoluted, as seeking a change of my address. We had moved house last November. Around that time, I missed paying a bill on time (I didn’t receive it). Dozens of calls carrying different levels of threat later, I was able to convince the goons that it was not my fault — that, in fact, I was a sucker who paid my bill within three days of receiving it, even though I had three weeks to do it and they could check my track record. Humiliating! The company then was efficiency personified. To lean back on one of the favourite themes of economists, I feel that efficiency was riding incentives — a gain, generally monetary, that drives people to do things they do. Something like working hard to get a raise, working out to build Van Damme kind of biceps or working outside the law and threatening customers when they miss paying their credit card bills. In the latter case, the goons threatening us get a commission — incentive — which gets them to carry out crimes in the garb of work. That was then. That was also when I gave them my new address — which, as ‘Kavita’, the last executive I spoke to, told me, has been ‘registered’ in their system. She also told me that this has been done half-a-dozen times, at various dates. But, for some reason, the computer has not ‘accepted’ the change. This task, in an age of computers, information systems and webs that companies pretend to have, should not take more than a minute. Which, again, is what Kavita told me — that she can bypass the system and incorporate the change online. Right now. So, why harass me into calling them repeatedly, for weeks and months on end, to get this small job done? I’ve spoken to various voices — Nikita and her supervisor Rudra, Rajal and her supervisor Sushank. And I still carry an expired card. No incentives to keep me as a customer, I suppose. Then I come to know that this company is luring new customers by offering free cards — I still have to pay my annual fees, but a new customer doesn’t. How inefficient. I mean, do these companies think that after this experience, they can still not only keep me as a customer but get me to pay for it? Audacious! And how short-term — the Nupurs, the Shubras and the Rahuls who had been calling me on my mobile and who I was driving away politely for months, are now finding a new warmth in my voice, open to new ‘free’ offers, new gifts and a new card. One of them is going to get me as a customer. But for how long, I don’t know. There isn’t really any ‘incentive’ to keep a customer. All active acts of card issuing companies seems to lie in acquiring new customers at high costs and indulging in downright criminal activities while seeking payments — sometimes due, mostly not — out of them. Tailpiece: Terror, it seems, is the new sunrise industry — on the stock markets, that is. Hardly hours after 7/7, before the head of the London blasts had even cooled down, an equity research note floated by the US-based Morgan Keegan’s homeland security group (HSG) put out a list of eight companies that “will benefit from security-tightening developments”. Since then, the share prices of these companies have risen by 7.6 per cent on an average. The businesses of these companies reads straight out of Jane’s: interception solutions, digital security and call centre recording and monitoring systems (Verint Systems, up 23.1 per cent), rapidly deployable atmospheric chemical detection monitors and multi-sensor networks (RAE Systems, up 9.6 per cent), and X-ray and metal detectors used to scan and inspect people, baggage, cargo and other objects for weapons, explosives, drugs, and contraband (OSI Systems, up 9.6 per cent). Wall Street seems bullish on the future of these stocks — their average PE stands at 54.7.
