With Flying Colors

My God, sometimes I just reflect my true colors all over again, and that really gets my juices flowing. I could have given myself a migraine had I been the travel agent who booked my itinerary over the course of close to four grueling hours yesterday evening.

But Mustafa Bhai at Tahiri Travels, a small but successful agency right behind every head office on I. I Chundrigar road, showed plenty of patience, resilience and commitment to satisfying my every whim.

As usual, I was after eating my cake and having it too – juggling event dates, seasonal fares, airline schedules, and office leaves – till I finally managed a tentative date with a complicated timetable and told him to take my documents home incase I just decide to take my life by storm and fly out that very night.

(Note to self: don’t even consider any airline that’s not Emirates if a broad range of flight options, i.e. precious time and flexibility, is more valuable than x amount more airfare).

A midnight call to tell him tonight’s off didn’t have him bothered him either. No wonder he has a ‘Best Supportive Agency’ on his wall. Mustafa Bhai at Tahiri Travels also certifies my personal Tough Customer Approved rating – which is about as difficult to get these days as a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Underneath your clothes

Chase up is actually a wonderful store. So is Cambridge, but it’s off my shopping route since they charge more than a 1k for a pajama (that’s actually worth it) and an arguably full price for damaged pieces at their factory outlet in Saddar.

With more branches that are thankfully representative of the new millennium unlike other clothes stores, customer service at Chase up ranges from less than nice to very nice.

But at Rs. 199 for a beautiful shirt that’ll last you at least a few months, I won’t bat an eyelid at the counter guys that can seriously do better. They also get my three star rating for exchanging a shirt that was discovered to be large-size after unpacking, my mistake, without so much as a sneer.

No shoestrings attached

So it’s a common tactic to reel in customers with a half-off sale on items no one wants (except the one to prove some items are nice that’s out of stock). But Urban Sole, and its partnership with Pierre Cardin is my idea of quality shoes that stand out from other offerings in the market. The customer service could be hand and foot, but their shoes are simply worth ignoring the price tags and dropping the grudge for claiming to have sold out your prized sale item that you suspect was a ruse: stylish + practical = bright designs, quality materials, finishing and comfort that just falls short of heavenly.

Ornamented yet Maddening Institute

The fact that no hospital has a gift or flower shop for visitors who’d like to cheer up their patients is the least of concerns. Spotless floors and pretty paintings are good enough for me any day. But with herons in your rock garden and elevator music (a first for Pakistan), you’d expect them to treat their private patients with some dignity at least. That’s why it’s so disappointing when a hospital known for its high standards and on the corporate panel of a number of leading organizations in Karachi so easily frustrates hospital visitors and patients that aren’t really such tough customers at all. For example, the family of a foreign patient from Dubai who just had a tumor removed isn’t being crabby when they scream at a male nurse who barges in to her private room when she’s getting a change of clothes. Or when her family visitors have to get a second opinion – not from a doctor, but from a front desk receptionist, since his colleague insists that she’s left the premises even when the only way that was possible would be through astral projection or other science fiction. Or when they refuse to serve dinner to the patient who’s just been operated and admitted since her family made the mistake of settling dues before dinner time. Or when security is only doing his duty when he becomes an automatic voice response system and keeps repeating ‘no I can’t allow you to wheel the patient out the gate’ into the taxi waiting right outside without even considering if he can make an exception to hospital policy of having the vehicle circle around and come inside. Okay, the last part wasn’t bad policy, though a couple of words vaguely resembling courtesy would have been a little softer. I guess I could have broken into a sob and a string of expletives, if only those damn herons weren’t so magnificent, and the hospital staff hadn’t had such impeccably clean shoes.

The Long Road to Amusement

There is an easier explanation to why someone would risk it all to hit the town. I mean driving at worrying speeds down a pitch-dark highway with colossal trucks and buses that put a brick on the accelerator and flash blinding high beams in your mirrors to overtake. Not that you have a clue when the asphalt suddenly turns to dirt road, a road block without any warnings suddenly comes up, or your tires fall in to a ditch. You just keep squinting into the darkness and drive.

It’s certainly not for the food. Everyone knows that your street’s corner restaurant tastes better. And that the presentation’s falling apart. And that you wait an hour and a half for your order to arrive, and another quarter for the rest of it. And it doesn’t really matter if you can actually gulp it down.

It may be for the ambience, that you’d like to believe exists. Because now you don’t have backrests, should you be one to prefer to sling back on a cushion of the charpai while having to stretch across a giant sized kitchen table to consume your meal. Not that it doesn’t have it merits – it makes the waiting so much more luxurious.

Obviously, it’s because of the driving need (and I mean literally) to go somewhere. Or be able to prove to your better half you’ve made the effort to go somewhere. Of course, if you managed your life effectively enough you could’ve booked a seat in the cinema two weeks ago to go to tonight’s show (and been heading the department you work in). Or you could’ve gone down to Zamzama and visited an increasingly popular (crowded and/ or expensive) grill/ cafe. But that doesn’t get more than three stars for effort. And that’s about all the ideas you can muster for a vanishing Sunday evening.

Star-spangled

Five stars aren’t always undeserved. The conference and exhibition today in one of the highest rated hotels in Karachi was a good indication of how my humble flat (complete with laundry lying around) is at least seven stars in comparison. I do keep my bathroom clean, even if it is isn’t sparkling. And going into the dining room doesn’t involve squeezing through a back-access corridor from the twilight zone. I’m not expecting exotic luxuries that stimulate the senses, though a projection screen that doesn’t give you a headache and a microphone that works during a key speech would be more preferrable. But a traditionally dressed doorman does pull the handle for you if you’re nice.

In development

A huge progressive organization I‘m familiar with obviously does an online survey like it was just invented. I was to ensure a high response rate by positive user interaction, so I may be biased when I say that part went right – 2,500 completed surveys in 6 weeks. Analyzing more than 60,000 records dumped in an excel spreadsheet, here are a bunch of lessons learned about doing an online survey from Pakistan:

1. Don’t expect your developer to do anything more than code your survey. If you’re thinking about having the information neatly handed over to you in a report (or at least having categorized responses), then you should have listed it in your initial requirements. Because chances are he (in some cases, she) didn’t know you were actually planning on analyzing, he/ she probably thought it was just another one of those mindless instructions that loses its intended purpose once it’s trickled down the various layers of management.
2. Try your best to leave out the ‘Other’ option. This is usually seen as a wonderful opportunity for the majority of Pakistanis to express their creativity, bad English, limited intelligence in understanding how surveys work and aversion towards reading through the list of options and clicking the option they’ve so elaborately misspelled. Incase you need to have it in there, try to make sure the response is standardized in some way or you’ll find a minimum 449 different responses instead of the 6 you expect.
3. Make sure you questions are extremely simple to understand. Some examples of answers to the question ‘Which new services would you like to see offered in Pakistan?’ are “I like to see big services” and “I can’t understand what it means”. Maybe I should have been curt and simply asked “Which new services you want?”

However, I did have a good working relationship with the developer and pivot tables can make up for system generated responses, so it wasn’t entirely unworkable. However, I think developers should be more business-minded and take the time to think about what end-users want, even if they don’t specify it, instead of being fed instructions like a robot. Maybe I’m wrong, but I sure need a better approach next time around.

With the lights out, its less dangerous

It’s our fault really. I mean having to make a couple of updates on our national identity card has caused everyone so much trouble. And just when we’ve decided that things are going smoothly today, the lights go out. As we retire back to the waiting bench and the NADRA center staff gets out the snacks and assumes their daily lights-gone party huddle, no body’s complaining. Nobody’s complaining that the center should get a power generator. Nobody’s complaining that there a million things that they’d rather be doing than sitting in the dark fanning themselves till the lights come back on two hours later. Everybody’s sitting patiently, waiting, even appreciatively, including my wife and I. That’s because the not-so-distant-past had dark stinking dilapidated buildings with red-stains in every corner from tobacco spit, and crabby officials who’d like to make it as hard for you as possible so they could earn a bribe. Now at least the surroundings were clean and computers did most of the administrative work instead of runners fetching and filing dusty papers. We even spent some quality time having a conversation till the lights came back on.

Spread the SMEDA

Here in Pakistan, there’s not much value for a small fry. Neither do most organizations have the slightest clue about what good customer service is.

Thank god for SMEDA (Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority) then. I could almost spend the afternoon doing that, because these guys actually mean well. That’s saying a lot these days. Sure, they don’t always decide to go ahead and finally pick up the phone, and then it sounds more like the you mistakenly dialed someone’s home number, but when you do get down to business, they’re really quite friendly.

And that’s because they’d really like to help you. They give you the information you need, and even try to get some extra information into your thick skull that’s useful to you in a really nice polite way.

Well, this country depends on SMEs. I won’t miss a beat in recommending SMEDA to anyone who’d like to find out about starting their own business. They even have a great website with well documented helpful information that’s a real gem in my favorites list. You can also call them on 111-111-456.

Feroz in legal services is definitely one of the good guys here, even if he speaks too fast.

Exemplary computer stores

This excerpt has been taken from the popular blog ko.offroadpakistan.com:

Written back in 2004, the writer later updated his post in January 2007. Things are pretty much the same, if not worse.

“Walk into any computer store in Karachi. The likelihood is:

• The person behind the counter doesn’t know much about computers.
• He (and it’s definitely going to be a he) doesn’t really use computers.
• The price will be as high as they think they can get away with.
• Does not realize that he can make his life much easier using the same computers he’s selling to automate much of the mindless software installation and troubleshooting they keep doing.
• Has never heard of automated installs and imaging.
• Customer support… ( no no no )
• Everything will be scattered about in a way to make even the simplest task take at least half an hour.
• Everything will be connected to a single overloaded stablizer, causing all the monitors to flicker like mad.
• There will only be a single phillips head screwdriver in the whole shop, which will be borrowed periodically by someone next door.
• Has never wondered why most of their customers come to him with the same issues over and over again.

The consumer is also to blame, for they are looking for the cheapest possible bargain. As shops mature and improve with time, their prices naturally go up and people shift on to the next crap store around the block. Of course, this being Pakistan, often times as computer shops get ‘established’ the prices start creeping up and the service down.”

Read the complete article here.

A lack of character

Here’s one for the likes of Yahoo! and even our favorite Google.

Why do you allow users to enter more than 200 characters when you don’t allow any more than that?

Average guys like me have to take it to the word editor and bang their heads before reducing their life story to a couple of sentences.

I’ve learnt my lesson the hard way over and over again. I guess I’m just too trusting to believe that the four sentences I’ve put into that text box will be less than 200 characters.

At least its not just Pakistani businesses that can make customers like me go red in the ears a bit. It even includes companies that don’t be evil.

Here in Karachi, we’re all tough customers. I don’t mean that we’re always complaining. Quite the opposite, in fact. We’re all tough customers because no one treats us right!

And like all beaten, hardened and weathered things, we’ve even stopped realizing it. So when the salesperson completes the sale, the tough customer like me is the one who says thank you.

Well, its high time one of us tough customers blogged about how it makes knots in your stomach when the one shop selling the thing you want asks you if you’re planning on buying before being bothered enough to take it off the shelf for you. Or how you wait twenty minutes on the phone for administration to pick up – and the then the staff member shuts the phone on your face mid-sentence.

And I’m still not complaining, really, I’m imploring someone to raise the bar just a little bit, so that us tough customers can maintain some dignity and self-respect. That, and realize that there’s plenty of space for improvement. So if you’re on my side of the counter, then hopefully you’ll realize some tough customer’s going to turn his/ her back some day. That may be your walk-in customer, your college student, or even your employee.

So whenever you’re kind enough to help me with a post, give me your worst customer service ever! Let’s hope you go on to hear from someone else then, how you really don’t seem very educated about customer service, Mr. Bad-service-provider…

Trust me, I’m only trying to help you.