Customer Service and Decision Making
My favorite teacher, Miss(Or is it Mrs? 
) Life today gave me two important lessons.
The first one was taught early morning (too early actually) when I went in for giving my Bike for service. In Cochin giving bike for service is a 10 minute job at best; you just go in, give the bike, take the slip and get out. Initially in Bangalore, my experiences were the same, abet with increasing delays each time around. But the last trip to the service center totally pissed me off. Owning a Unicorn which unfortunately (or fortunately) is from the same company which makes another kind of 2-wheeler that the young girls today fancy was the primary cause for my disenchantment. With a combined service center for both, what happens is that you end in the service center alongside lots of cute college/office going chicks in their perky little cloths(in a comical rather than a sexist way 
). And with the service center have a low staff sex ratio (0% actually) chances are that the staff‘s body as a whole is attracted in the direction of the gals irrespective of the actual time of their arrival. Of course logically they should serve them later so as to keep them there for the longest time, but in front of a girl I guess a guy’s logic goes berserk. Anyways, such a situation leads a particular class of guys to go berserk in a different mode unknowingly uttering addressing the staff with words they probably would never utter in front of a girl otherwise.
But this time, as I went in, the system had changed at different places. For one you had to book your appointment in advance and only then could you go, so that they could try to distribute the crown evenly. Also as you go in, a chauffeur takes the bike off your hand and parks at a designated location which is associated with a rank or slot for the service man to attend to. Of course this extra process pulls the efficiency down a bit from having that guy also attend the incoming bikes, but there is a definite process in place and sense of justice to the whole exercise.
This “Sense of Justice” is something that I think will (or should) drive customer service in India. Our large population is something that will make most things, that seem trivial in other countries, manifest into logistical nightmares and with our cost of living most companies (I am talking about companies that cater to the middle class which is going to be the largest section in India in the coming years) can’t afford to have the extra manpower to solve it though quantitative solutions. But by driving their initiative using the mantra of “Sense of Justice”, they will be able to get Satisfied and consequently repeat customers. Come to think of it, I waited for around the same time I had last time, but I left the place with a much calmer mind and without embarrassing myself or others with any verbal gymnastics.
The next lesson was after the morning break which constituted of getting to office. The venue was my cubicle and medium was thru an e-learning module. Going thru my daily reads, I was lead on to a blog post about the archaic TOS of BW. At a superficial level it was about reinventing oneself to survive in the industry as the equations change (The so-called Point of Inflection as coined by Andrew S Grove). But the deeper message that I came across was the simple message “If you make decisions for a company use what you produce or at the very least think like someone who does and if you cant do that listen to people who think like it”
Class dismissed 
