ITE - Complaint Management

Today most service providing consumer organizations are facing a deadlock with lot of consumers who are not happy with their complaints. They have their dedicated customer care units, but all they do is send you an automated e-mail saying 'Assuring you of best of our servives' while they do not even understand the problem. Customers keep writing, sometimes they get the calls from various people in the organization who only say 'I will get back to you' and your problem remains where it is. Most of these problems are systemic issues in the organizations which they are either not aware of or try to ignore the scale or impact of the complaint. 

A case in point is Airtel. You can get a connection with required documentation, but try giving up that connection. Almost impossible. You fill the forms, you write e-mails, you tell them s strict NO on their persuasion calls, but they do not disconnect and keep sending you the bills long after you have moved from the city and have not used their services. Many customers across the country have faced this problem. The key problem is there is no SLA on disconnecting. In their bid to maintain the number of subscribers they do not want you to give up their services. But that does mean they do not have a documented process to do so. 

Idea is to create a problem that understands problems from customers and based on the collective problem asks the company to sort it out in a given time frame. This idea has been tried by Govt, but failed miserbaly. they in fact wanted to charge the brands to provide this service, and apparently brands were willing to pay. They could not get the right momentum going on this initiative and hence never took off. 

I propose a slightly different version of the same complaints portal - Sign up with few brands - Telecom companies and large private Banks would be a good beginning. Use the social media to get complaints - when consumers are suffering they will hold on to any straw handed to them. And see if you can be the mediator between the consumer and the company. Works well for everyone, consumers do not have to take a legal recourse which is expensive and time taking, companies can sort out their issues peacefully while improving their internal systems. 

There are smaller organizations doing it in a small and specialized way, like The Hoot that takes complaints against media misconduct and tries to get them sorted. 

This can be a non-profit idea, or you can charge the brands a bit for each complaint that you take to them. This idea requires some knowledge of law, consumer rights, knowledge of focussed organizations working in some niche areas and operating processes of business organizations. This needs to be tested as you are trying to make a business model based on disputes and complaints. 

I am happy to announce that entrepreneur Prateek Narang has picked up the experience gifting idea and is working on it. 

Rules of Innovation

Harry West of Continuum in his HBR Blog talks about Three Rules of Innovation. Though I think the format of the post is in line with the HBR format.

The important take away is that to innovate in teams, there must be an open dialogues, a free flowing communication which is never personal or personality impacted, and is always focussed on the creative output required from the job at hand. This is important when you are doing a focussed creative work that is expected to generate some output in a given time and with given resources. When you are debating the idea, it is very important be open and transparent and keep your individual egos away in the interest of the work at hand. 

He talks about separate space or a room for project teams, which I think is not really required in all environments, it is probably required in his kind of work where it is all about being creative in each and every project. Also I believe in being frugal and not spending over the head to be creative. Creativity should come from you internally, you should feel the urge to do something creative and not expect the whole environment to turn upside down to help you be creative. Unless you have an urge from inside to crack a problem, no amount of environment setting is going to help. 

Innovation Personalities

This Forbes Article talks about Five personalities of Innovation. You can read the article to know the five types and its possible that you have a bit of all of them in you.

But I like the part where author says that you need to balance the risk takers and risk averse people in your innovation team. If everyone is a risk taker, you may loose on the practicality of the idea and the execution plan may not be as tight. If the risk averse are more, most ideas will be lost on the ideation table and may never get to experimentation stage as people will look more at the down side of trying out the idea.

Having said that, can we really get a perfect balance? People behave differently in different situations. For example I can be very experimental when it comes to travelling but I am extremely conservative when it comes to financial planning. Then there are always external factors that influence people in the corporate environment, like what category does my boss fall into? Most people will tend to tilt towards their bosses personality to an extent, sometimes overriding their own natural personality style as there are many rewards associated with the boss. The peer group can also have an impact. Take me out of my current environment and I may be a different personality.

While these classifications serve as broad guidelines, on the ground what matters is the resolve of the leadership to do something.

ITE - Online Experience Gifting

The concept of gifting and the nature of gifts has changed over time. When we were kids, we wanted games and clothes, when we were teenagers it was all about greeting cards, then came the age of flowers and chocolates, then books and now you have to really think hard to find a gift for most people. The current trend is moving towards gifting experiences as with reasonable levels of affluence people often like to choose their own stuff. Gift vouchers are there, but they are very impersonal and formal, they are like saying take this money and buy yourself whatever you want - works for formal relationships. 

Experience gifting can be personal gift, tailor made for the person and the occasion to make the receiver feel special or gift them something that they may not buy for themselves. Let me give you some examples:

• Gift your parents a luxury dinner on their birthdays / anniversary. Have them picked up from home, dinner served and dropped back. Yo should be able to design it sitting anywhere with your favorite restaurant and have it delivered on the given date.
• Gift your better half a spa treatment at the best spa in town
• Gift your amateur photograph friend a photography workshop by best known photographer
• Gift a culinary workshop as a wedding gift to your friends
• Gift a custom designed treasure hunt to all the kids at a family gathering
• Gift a custom made vacation to your friends / family

Ideas are infinite. 

Can you setup a website, that will let people gift experiences in collaboration with the service providers of these gifts? If you think it is a good idea, talk to me.