I had been restlessly waiting for my credit card to be delivered. I always become a bit uneasy when the expiry date of a card draws near and the new one is yet to find itself in my hands. So I was. I mean, my being uneasy.
When the doorbell rang the other scorching afternoon and I peered over the parapet to see a man who could only be a courier deliveryman, I was more than relieved. Phew! There comes my Standard Chartered Bank card.
But it didn’t. Not that noon at least.
With an air of superciliousness, the smartly-dressed man from Blue Dart asked for an identification. That was fine by me, for some protocol has to be followed when it comes to delivery of credit cards. I fished out an identification card that did not go down well with him.
It does not have an employee number, he pointed out in sheer disgust. Ok, so what do I do? You don’t have anything like a driver’s licence? Oh yes, I do.
I am not asked every other day by cops to pull over and flash my driving licence. It, therefore, took me more than a moment to ferret it out. By that time, for some reason obscure to me even now, his patience seemed to have been wearing thin.
His demeanour turned rude and insolent, and the lad had the temerity to go to the extent of saying "I am a very busy man. Don't waste my time. You should do as I say." Yes, not in the most polite of ways. “I don’t have time for this (bullshit).”
I myself keep extremely busy and have no time or patience for altercations, like the uncalled-for one that ensued. Needless to say, he did not deliver the packet after the exchange of words and coolly walked away with the look as if he was visting me to do me a favour. All he stopped short of doing was cock a snook at me.
That got me.
Soon after he left, I went through the Blue Dart website which did not have a customer redressal form. But technically speaking, I wasn’t a customer of theirs anyway, by any yardstick. Their customer, after all, was Standard Chartered.
I spent some more time on the Net and made a couple of calls. It took me a while to find a couple of relevant email addresses.I wrote to two of the seniormost board members of the company outlining what had transpired an hour earlier. I also called my bank to apprise them of the development.
An hour later I received a call from a senior official at Blue Dart’s office in New Delhi. I told the lady what had happened. She was profusely apologetic about the deplorable behaviour of the company’s staff. And so were the two other officials who also called me up the following morning.By afternoon, the packet had been delivered to me. Personally by two senior managers.
In the end, I wasn’t relieved that the credit card had finally been delivered to me. I was, in fact, quite taken in and embarrassed by the turn of events. By the manner in which the company’s officials went about redressing the grievance of a man who wasn’t their direct customer.
One thing was obvious from what I saw of the company officials’ handling of the incident – they were serious about the organisation’s image. And image-building was for them a tad more than high-brow sloganeering – it was about service, it was about accountability.
I have heard that thing about customer being the king.It sounds good, but I have very rarely seen it in practice. Especially in a place as uncouth and uncivil as Delhi. So it came as a pleasant surprise to see that for a company, the customer of a customer matters too.
The incident, at hindsight, makes for an interesting case study. All companies talk big about customer service. Make for good sound bytes. The closing of a sale is not an end in itself, it has to be the means to an end. And the means do include follow-ups and, of course, grievance redressal.
When managers start holding themselves accountable and answerable for the hanky-panky that their foot soldiers indulge in, it can only benefit the company. I have no idea how Blue Dart dealt with the errant foot soldier of theirs, but I am sure he would have had some explanation to do. After all, the lad who expressed such chagrin at his precious time being wasted had, in turn, wasted that of six other senior officials of his own company. Apart from his own, and mine.
I have served in the corporate world, and that too in the service industry, and I know for certain that no amount of advertising or sloganeering is substitute for word-of-mouth publicity. Especially, when it comes to best practices. And best practices in the service industry at least begin and end with customer service.
This same incident also provided a study in contrast. I have said how Blue Dart dealt with a customer of their client. Now I must chip in a word about how Standard Chartered handled their loyal customer of 15 years standing.
When I had called up the bank to tell them of the non-delivery of the credit card, I had asked the customer care executive if she could furnish me a complaint number. Oh, we have no such thing! But then how do I refer to this incident should I need to call up the bank again later? Oh, we have our means of recording and tracking these things. She did not elaborate.
So, after the card had been delivered I decided to call up the bank lest there be any scope for confusion or complication. You never know. The executive who answered did not have the faintest idea what I was talking about. I let the matter end there.
Can’t bank on empty words, can you?
