Swagatham to you...!!

BSNL, keeping up with its wishful nomenclatures, very enthusiastically named its ‘one stop’ customer care service SWAGATHAM when launched a few years ago. The word translated says ‘welcome’, very aptly captured in the denotations of a woman smiling.

If you are a customer of the state service provider, however, any single call you make to Swagatham will make the symbols remind you, every single time, that the joke was on you. The only welcome you will get is to an eternal waiting tone or a cranky executive if you have the patience to wait for one. A blue moon case of an executive who, at least, understands what your query is, or knows what he/she is talking about is, however, not ruled out. The rule to the exception, however, is someone who will stick to a single irrelevant reply no matter how you reframe your question. A prototype example:

E: BSNL Swagatham Services, How may I help you?
C: I need to reset my portal password as I have forgot it and the website is not responding to reset requests.
E: Hold on.
(5, 10 or 15 minutes depending on the mercy of the executive)
C: Are you there?
C: Hello…?
E: We can’t give you the user id and the password on the phone.
C: I am not asking you for the user id and the password. I just want you to reset the id so that I can register again with my unique id.
E: Hold on.
C: Hello?
E: I am sorry but we can’t give you the password.
C: What part of ‘I don’t want the password’ do you not understand? I want you to reset it, not give it to me.
E: Okay. Tell me the user id and password on the portal.
C: What? I just told you I don’t remember it. That’s why I called. If I had it why would I call you?
(Call disconnected from the other end)

This is a gist of a recent conversation, one among innumerable, handled by the Smiling Swagathams. This excerpt is surely capable of not turning many heads as it is definitely much more pleasant than what many customers encounter. A shouting, scolding or merely disconnecting executive is the norm of the land. The executives won’t give you their name if they don’t want to and a wish to talk to a superior is just another unpleasant dream.

A call was made to the DGM (Call Centre) of BSNL, Andhra Pradesh recently in which her attention was brought to the extreme anarchy flooding the Swagatham floors. Surprisingly, or not, the reply was, “What can we do? We keep telling them about it.” The shock expressed by the concerned consumer on this reply was met by a technical barrier, a request to provide the exact date and time of the call. It was impressed upon her that it was not just one call but the general prevalent attitude. A request to find a way to overhaul the training procedures and provide refresher training to the executives was met with the very familiar, “It is a government organization. Things don’t happen like that”. The DGM kept insisting on the exact time of the call and even a range of 10-15 minutes here and there did not seem enough. The DGM, showing where the executives get the disconnecting legacy from, conveniently disconnected the call. A recall saw another familiar reply, “I am talking to you for 10 minutes. Don’t waste my time? What do you want? I am going somewhere. I am going to a meeting”. The DGM did not seem to mind an intimation to escalate the matter and bang comes the phone down again.

The global Indian back office does not need to probe much to find the dark underbelly of the Indian service sector, epitomized in the state provided services, BSNL AP Swagatham being the immediate case in point. The international support provided by India’s contact centres have features like reflectory statistics on Average (Call) Handling Time, First Call Resolution Rate, the technical framework of every single call being recorded and retrievable on demand and the least possible courtesy of sharing the name.

The colonial professionalism of serving the gora with the best we’ve got and spitting on the domestic consumer lives.