I’d like to take you back to early 1992. I was in grade 10, a very young lad of just 15 years old. Until this particular day I’d only gone to the movies with my family & cousins. Never had I gone to the theatres with friends. From 16 till 28 I would go quite often with friends or a cousin or 2 (or 3 or 4 or infinity) and many, many times on my own as well. But the memory that I am digging up from my cellar of a mind is this day, I think late January or so. My best friend Samir and I decided that we would go out on a Saturday afternoon and catch a movie and then have an early dinner before heading back to our homes.
So post a quick lunch I caught a bus to Edapally Toll, where he was waiting for me and then we both headed out to the city (we used to live in the suburbs) for some window shopping and bird watching. So we roamed around for a bit and then went for the movie. It was sold out. We tried another one that we thought would be good but that was sold out too. What do we do now? Well Samir was a closet Kamal Hassan fan and so he talked into going for this really dumb Tamil movie and 8 minutes in, I almost killed him because it was really quite stupid!
Anyways, 3 hours later we came out of the theatres, minus a few brain cells that didn’t survive the movie viewing and then walked for about an hour talking about stuff. We came to the North Railway station area and selected a small hotel that was known for their good food. For 9 bucks each we had a belly full of dinner – 4 porottos each and beef curry! Just 9 bucks per person. Nowadays that will cost you 40-60 bucks easily, depending on where you eat. The hotel had since closed down and demolished and rebuilt, I think 7 years ago after the owner died of old age. It’s now a store that sells books but everytime I pass it, I always remember my buddy & I having dinner there all those years ago. Cheapest full meal I ever ate.
I’ve been a call center agent working in two call centers. One outbound telemarketing to the US & UK and then for a domestic mobile service provider as their inbound customer care. I’ve also trained for another one before that. It’s not an easy job. And then I was in supervisory positions and in training positions. Therefore I usually have lots of considerations for people who work in these call centers. When they call me for selling or upselling, I’m usually very polite and listen to their pitch before thanking & declining the offer. Unless ofcourse it is a good one, which I will sign up for. When I have complaints with my services like mobile or internet, I call up and always appreciate the good agents. When the interaction is exceptional, I make it a point to tell them so.
But I also hate it when the interaction is terrible. I get annoyed and impatient although I’d seldom say anything really rude. I was not the best agent during my time, but I was among the best. And let me tell you in our group, the very worst was still damn good. I’ve called Tata Indicom, my ISP, three times recently to complain about service outages and have appalled at the horrendous efforts of the 2 boys & girl who have picked up my calls. A few days ago I called up and this young punk was trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I told him that I wasn’t getting connectivity and he said “maybe there is a cable cut or there might be some technical problems”. I told him to get his facts correct and check it up. And he was speaking rather unprofessionally. He did and then sheespishly said that there was a server error in my area and he’d raise a complaint on my behalf. Idiot didn’t want to bother to check it out at first!
Today twice I had to call up as my services were down from morning! The first time it was a girl and I could make out that she was probably a trainee – not at all professional and she kept saying “sir, 1 minute” instead of asking me to be on hold! I can’t blame her for taking a long time if she was infact a trainee (hey I can understand, atleast she wasn’t rude and she kept trying to reassure me that things would be fixed soon). But they should teach her that a customer isn’t her friend (she kept speaking to me like I was her bosom buddy, and by that I mean the way she spoke) and she should be more professional. In the afternoon I called up again to follow up on my complaint – the agent spoke to me in Hindi, even if I had selected the option for English!
That’s ok but once again, thoroughly unprofessional manner of speaking and he put on multiple long holds. Looks like they were facing software lags and his system was slow. I can’t blame him for that can I? Still I wouldn’t have said anything but I kinda lost it when he told what that he cannot open my complaint link and that there is an error there. Listen up – so fucking what??? I told him, son do not tell me what the error is, tell me when my complaint is gonna be fixed. Once again looooooooooooooong hold and he gave me a vague promise of a technical person who will check up on my issue and call me. No call yet, it’s 7 hours or so since I spoke to this guy but my problem got fixed.
I wish that Tata Indicom would fix their technical problems and regular outages. I must have raised a dozen complaints this past month. I’m not in a position to change ISPs at the moment and I’ve been with then for over 5 years now. But I do not know how much more I can take of their crappy services.