Sales and After Sales No-Support

As consultants, one thing is drilled into us is not to make false promises or over commit and always support the commitment made to the client. However, this is not something which others, especially most Indian organisations believe in.

Why limit oneself to industry alone, starting from our political leaders, everyone tries their level best to cheat the common man. And, surprisingly we all are so used to such kind of double standards that we consider it as our fate and an acceptable behaviour, and starangely we actually plan our lives taking into account such behaviour. e.g. if i call my local cable operator for some fault i'll assume that the person would not come the same day even if he assures me the same, rather i'll try and keep myself free for next couple of days expecting his gracious visit after a few phone calls are made after the first day..afternoon..and..evening is over. As most Indians like me would have seen that when we go to a shop to purchase some product or a service, the salesman would bend backwards to make the sale. But, when it comes to 'After Sales Support', the same organisation would turn their back to you and the same salesman would look the other way or if you are lucky give you a look "Why is he here to waste my time?".
This made me think, why do most Indian organizations, small or big, behave this way. Is it one our many strange yet true national traditions or a freak exceptional behaviour. After a bit of thinking i could jot down a couple of possible reasons that i feel could justify this behaviour.The following could be some of the reasons that i could think of:

1) This is a soceital problem, we are brought up this way, and we do not provide after sales support and are rude to people who come back to us for support.

2) We usually do not consider the cost of after sales support when we make the sale. So any after sale support actually eats into our margin. So, we discourage or many a time avoid supporting our sales.

3) The sales support team is not trained and equipped well enough to handle customer complaints and requests. You spend quite a lot of energy in explaining the customer support person what went wrong whose IQ level would be slightly higher than a moron (if you are lucky) or maybe between an Idiot and a Moron (now you are doomed, better call later and if you are lucky, a moron would support you, else better option is to repair the fault yourself).

4) When we make a purchase, we do not clarify the SLA's (Service Level Agreements) with the seller. This agreement can be a verbal one, in case there is no written agreement. Though it hardly makes any difference whether the agreement is verbal or written. At least in case of a written agreement you can approach a consumer court in case of breach of agreement, refer my point below on appraching a court. The usual problem is that the seller would have completely different set of standards when it comes to support which is radically different from our understanding of support for the product or service. So always find out the SLA's before making the purchase.

5) The organisations know it very well that rarely an individual would approach the court of law in case they do not get the desired support as promised to them. So, its convenient for the organisation not to provide the support at all. The problem being the sad story of Indian legal system. I do not wish to delve into this matter now, as much has already been written on the sad state of affairs of Indian Legal system (last i heard there were a few millions cases pending before the courts).

6) Sometimes organisations do not spend enough on setting up after sales support infrastructure. Mostly they are user-unfriendly and someimes the infrastructure is way over burdened. How many of us have spent hours listening to Interactive Voice response systems of some of our famous private sector banks or our mobile telecom service providers who do everything other than help you with your query. You start with calling the customer support number which will make you listen to the bank song (my favourite bank of some I's and some C's: the telephone sings a tune "hum hein na"...while i sing "kahan ho tum", roughly translated in English it means "I am here", my response is "Where are you" for quite some time). Post this you will be thankful to listen to some voice like, Press 1 for English, press 2 for Hindi, press 3 for $@#, then you go to another menu which starts all over from 1, then once you press 9 for 'Oh! God, please show mercy on me' you are connected to some live person. Even after you reach the right place after wandering through the etheral world, you will be asked to enter your 16 digit Card number, and if you don't remember it you have to answer the following.

(a) your date of birth

(b) your mother's maiden name,

(c) Last three transactions that you made (unluckily last time i swiped my card i was way too tipsy to remember the exact bill amount, so i had to answer the next question)

(d) your favourite teacher's name (I really love this question). If you have set some other question while filling up the Registration form with the bank some couple of years back, you will be asked the same question. Some of my more forgetful friends had preempted this scenario and luckily have set this question as "India's Independence Day" (if you forget this, someone else in your office would surely be knowing it).

Hope this situation changes within our lifetime else the future generations would also share the same joy of interacting with the customer support that we now currently experience in India.