SuSMETA

Customer focus – we don’t get it – 1

Vivek Hurry — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:44:41 +0000

A rant about a couple of incidents last week. And I'm naming the companies involved because their customer focus sucks and someone needs to tell the world that.

First one: ICICI Lombard and auto insurance

My wife renewed her car insurance policy by shifting to ICICI Lombard from her old insurer (New India). Cheaper rate, better valuation, no claims bonus carried forward and all that. So far, so good.

When the cover note arrived, she was referred to as "Mr." and the address on the policy was wrong (although the previous policy, of which ICICI Lombard had a copy, had the right address). Okay, so mistakes happen.

So, I went online to see if I could fix it or register a complaint or do something meaningful. After all, ICICI Lombard runs a neat online insurance purchase site which they advertise like the dickens and which I've used to buy travel insurance fairly seamlessly (credit where it's due). I found the Customer Support link on the page without much problem, clicked on it and got to the page where it seemed like I could do some of the customer support stuff online instead of dialing a number, working my way through a telephone menu and then being put on hold for twenty minutes. I jumped at the chance and clicked on the support page.

It asked me for my policy number and then one of four other identifying numbers (car registration, chassis, engine and something else which I forget). A bit strange, since after all the policy number should be unique, but okay, I'm willing to be flexible.

I tried filling in the policy number. There were four boxes to fill in the four parts of the number. Straightforward. I filled in the first three and tried to tab over to the fourth. No go. I tried clicking on it. Nada. I was using the Chrome browser on a Mac, which shouldn't make a difference but apparently it did. I tried Safari. Same problem plus a few more. Abandon Safari and switch to Firefox. At last! I can fill in everything. I fill in the policy and the engine number (last 5 digits) and click on Search.

I wait. And wait. And wait. I play a game of Freecell that takes me about a couple of minutes.

Finally, after 4 whole minutes of waiting, the web page deigns to give me a search result. Well, actually 5 results. It pulls up 5 policies none of which are for my wife's car. None of which are even for my city – they are for Gurgaon and Secunderabad and other cities.

I tried again with the chassis number this time. Waited. Grew old. This time 6 other policies none of which were for my wife's car (and no duplicates from the previous list that I could see, either).

I gave up in sheer frustration.

There is so much wrong with what happened.

Firstly, the ICICI site says "works best with IE" or some such disclaimer. That is stupid. Any site should work with any browser and particularly a site that is focused on customer support should work well with the widest possible range of browsers. IE's market share has been sinking for many months now and shows no sign of reversing its trend (e.g., http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9207625/Chrome_Safari_reach_record_browser_share_highs). To predicate your web policy around a single, failing browser is the height of stupidity and laziness (I'm looking at you, you .ASP programmers). To consciously exclude 44% of the market is ridiculous.

Secondly, to follow a policy numbering system that allows for duplicate numbers is just plain daft. What were those database designers smoking? Add a prefix, add a suffix, do something to make the policy number unique.

Thirdly, to take anything more than a few seconds (in the single digits) to return search results is incredibly inefficient. No excuses for that given today's high-powered database software and even higher-powered servers.

Fourthly, to return multiple results for what should be a unique combination of search criteria (policy number plus another number) is ludicrous (okay, I'm running out of polite adjectives here).

Fifthly, when none, not one, of those multiple results is the right one, then I am seriously worried about ICICI Lombard's record-keeping and database management skills. If I ever need to claim against that policy what's going to happen? Are they going to pay Srikrishna in Secunderabad instead?

Sixthly, to show multiple results that include the insured's name, address, car details, none of which pertain to me is surely a breach of privacy and security as far as those individuals are concerned.

I'm not worried about my own privacy, of course. Heck, they couldn't find my policy anyway. Odds are no one else will either.

Break the rules, do your own thing, but do it right

Vivek Hurry — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:56:11 +0000

Great article from Wired (though a bit dated: it’s from 2008) on how Apple breaks almost every management rule and still dominates its chosen niches (and yes, Microsoft notwithstanding, it does dominate the PC and notebook industry in its chosen niche of high-end, super-cool-to-use desktops and laptops):

How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

Required reading.

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Small businesses can use tech to save money

Vivek Hurry — Mon, 17 May 2010 15:47:10 +0000

I’ve been sort of neglecting this blog for a bit while I teach myself Ruby on Rails, Applescript and relearn all the CSS and XHTML I forgot while doing ‘management things’. Forgot how much fun it is to write code.

Anyway, to tide things over, here’s a link to an interesting Mashable article on SuSMETA type topics. Says much the same thing I’ve been saying for at least the last couple of years.

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Moo, er, tweet?

Vivek Hurry — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:06:34 +0000

Cows tweeting about their milk production. Fascinating use of technology in a millennia-old process. And poetic too. http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/cows-on-twitter/

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India, Google and privacy

Vivek Hurry — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:56:13 +0000

Interesting map of countries that have either asked Google for information on users or have asked Google to remove content: http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

For the six months from Jul 1 2009 to Dec 31 2009, India ranks 3 on removal requests (142) and 4 on data requests. Our bedfellows (above us on the charts): Brazil, US, UK and Germany.

Are these indicators of governments being proactive, snoopy, paranoid? Efficient? More info needed.

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Crashplan

Vivek Hurry — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:45:35 +0000

Whoa, there, let’s backup a bit.

Okay, bad pun.

Seriously, though, backup is something everyone should take very seriously and almost no one does. Ironically, the people who should back up the most diligently, i.e., the non-geeks, are the ones who almost never do so.

Backups are painful to do, take time, space, cosmic energy and are no fun. Until your hard drive crashes and you lose all those photos of grandma on the rollercoaster.

Enter Crashplan.

Important pricing information:

Free, as in no money required. Or, as low as $5 p.m., but read the fine print.

You need:

An internet connection, preferably one that’s always on while your computer is on. And a suitable lead time for the first backup – if you have lots of data, it could be running (auto) for several days. A local disk is faster but is not an offsite backup.

I tend to be OCD about backups. I’ve used a raft of backup software and currently use no less than three different backup programs on two machines.

One is Time Machine that comes bundled with the Mac. Simple, loads of eye candy, but only backs up to a local (external) hard disk. So, if a power surge fries my equipment or a burglar climbs in the window, my originals and my backup both stand an equal chance of consignment into oblivion.

So, I also use Mozy. For $5 per machine per month, it backs up my stuff into the cloud (Mozy’s servers), so now my backup also sits off my premises. But $5 per machine per month adds up when you have 5 machines in the household. And restoring 60+ Gb from the cloud can be sl-o-o-w (I hope I never have to find out how slow). And Mozy doesn’t do local backups, so I need to use Mozy + Time Machine.

Cue the trumpets and cymbals.

Crashplan backs up an unlimited number of machines in a household and an unlimited number of Gb to the cloud (Crashplan’s servers) for about $8 per month. The downside is you pay upfront for the full year, rather than monthly as for Mozy. If you pay for 3 years, the cost per month comes down to $5.

That’s not all. If you like living on the edge and don’t opt for the cloud backup, then Crashplan is completely free. With the software download you back up locally to any other machine/s on your network. That’s not all.

If you have a friend you can trust, you can backup your machine to hers and vice versa – all for free (over your internet connection, so it could be slow).

Like Mozy and Time Machine, Crashplan works in the background, so you set it and forget it. If you like, you get weekly emails giving you the backup status.

Oh, and it’s cross platform – Mac, Win, Linux, whatever.

Automatic backups, local backups, cloud backups, backups to friends, free or cheap…. Crashplan has you covered.

It’s a no-brainer.

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Cloudy thinking

Vivek Hurry — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 05:17:14 +0000

Bumped into this article a week back, on Yale’s delaying its switch to Google Apps. The full article is here (Mashable).

While reading it, it struck me that there’s more to this than meets the eye. Ideological issues? What are we discussing here, whether to invade China? Statements like “was met with concerns and reservations from the faculty and administration. Several felt the decision had been made too hastily and without proper University approval” reeks of an incredible degree of resistance to change.

A university, in theory, is supposed to be a think tank and a trend setter and a research hot bed, adopting, adapting and espousing the cutting edge. Let’s not forget that the Internet’s daddy, ARPANET itself was created by professorial geeks to link up three universities and a research institute (see Wikipedia) and the world wide web was invented by a professor working as an independent contractor at CERN.

This statement from Yale does not sound like they are keeping the pioneering flag flying. It sounds more like bureaucracy at its very finest.

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YATS!

Vivek Hurry — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:49:27 +0000

YATS! Ok, so I’m partial to acronyms: they make for good mnemonics. Today’s acronym is special because the last letter stands for another acronym, which makes this, what, a super-acronym?

Maybe.

YATS stands for Yet Another Technology Snafu and snafu, of course, stands for situation normal all… er… up. You get it, I’m sure, everybody’s been there.

At the start of the weekend, a bunch of us friends decided to meet for dinner at one of the city’s more famous and better Chinese restaurants. We were four couples and, rather than get into the usual Indian hosting tussle about who gets to pay the bill (used to amuse my kids no end when they were younger), we decided to be all grown up and mature about this and opted to split the bill four ways. Two of us had plastic and the other two wanted to pay with real Gs.

(Semantic aside: “real Gs” are thousand-rupee notes that have Gandhiji’s portrait on them. Unlike some other currencies, all denominations of Indian currency notes have a portrait of Gandhi (G) on them, but only the thousand rupee notes have a colloquial nomenclature that matches the initial, a ‘grand’ being a thousand, and hence abbreviated to a ‘g’.)

(Philosophical aside: Why does the RBI print on the currency notes it issues, a portrait of the only Indian leader who can honestly be said to have had no interest in money? Perhaps we should change the portrait with each issue of notes to show a more recent politician or two, who are rather well known to be interested in money. That would have the twin advantages of making the currency more current (ha, ha) as well as stymieing the counterfeiters.)

Back to the story.

We asked the maitre d’ to split the bill four ways. He said, no can do. ‘Our software does not allow that. And we cannot split the bill for liquor.’

Ok-a-a-y.
The two who wanted to pay real Gs gave the other two their share and the two plastic warriors put down their cards and asked the waiter to split the bill in two.

No can do, sir. ‘Our software does not allow that. And we cannot split the bill for liquor.’

Huh.

So put the entire liquor bill on one card, and put part of the food bill on that card, and the rest on the other card, so that both cards get an equal charge. A ten year old with a pocket calculator could do that faster than it took me to type out this paragraph. My neighborhood paanwalla could work that out in his head.

‘Sorry, sir, our software does not allow that. We can only do an equal split on two cards.’

I thought technology was supposed to be an enabler. Here’s one business that has succeeded in shooting itself squarely in the foot using technology. Unfortunately, it has plenty of company.

We ended up doing sums on the back of the bill, exchanging more real Gs with each other and generally destroying the satisfied feeling that follows a good meal. Next time, we’ll fight over the bill. It’s easier than lousy software.

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The day the falls didn’t

Vivek Hurry — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:44:06 +0000

March 30, 1848: Niagara Falls didn’t.

More at Wired.

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Heads in the clouds? Unfortunately, no.

Vivek Hurry — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:37:47 +0000

Looks like I’m not the only one with a poor opinion of CIOs (still CTOs in the Indian context). Here’s Marc Benioff of salesforce.com deploring their stick-in-the-mudness:

“My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster.”

I like that last line, so true. Read the full article here.

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