After weeks of resistance I succumbed to the iPad.
The argument against was that there aren't many Wi-Fi hotspots in India, which limits your ability to use one.
The answer was to get the one with 3G. That's not central to this story; it is only to say why I was in the market for a mobile phone connection.
Well, Saturday was Christmas and I was going to be travelling from the Monday, and you know how it is with tech toys: I wasn't going to wait until I returned and went to my office.
And so it came to pass that on the Sunday after Christmas I was shopping for a mobile connection.
I chose Airtel – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the 3G options available and the recent salience of the brand.
From the website I got a list of outlets within a short radius of my home. It gave addresses and had columns for parking ('Yes' for all); timing (10 am to 8 pm for all); and the weekly day off (blank for all); but, strangely for a telecoms company, no telephone numbers.
I have Airtel landlines and ADSL at home and some kind of preferred customer status, so I called the designated customer service number.
After wading through the IVR menu and getting a live human voice at the other end (Why do call centres speak to you in Hindi after you press 1 for English?) I was told this number was only for landlines and that I should call 98101 98101.
So I did. Asked where I should go for a new connection, the gent said, "You can get it where you buy recharge coupons."
"Ah, but I don't buy recharge coupons," I replied. "I need to get a mobile connection first."
"I'm trying to help you," he said. "If you don't find that helpful there's not much I can do," and hung up. Being well trained, he didn't forget to first say, "Thank you for calling Airtel."
I stubbornly called again and got someone else. She said that number was only for prepaid connections: for 'postpaid', as the term goes, I should call 98100 12345.
So I did. More IVR, about bill payment and value added services and so forth, and "to go back to the main menu press 1", or whatever.
Oh, I missed what I needed. Back to the main menu. But I was right the first time: every conceivable kind of information was available except if you wanted a new connection.
Clearly, Airtel don't expect that if you want a new telephone connection you might use a telephone to help get one.
I got that list from the website and set out.
The first outlet was closed. And the second. And the third... "Aaj Sunday hai na, ji ... (It's Sunday, you see)" If the website hadn't left the thoughtful 'weekly off' column thoughtlessly blank, or had given a phone number to call, I would have saved time and trouble. (It was right about parking, though, when it said 'Yes': there was a street outside each outlet.)
Four phone calls and an outing later I was no closer to a mobile connection.
Here is a company at the top of the heap; grown in hardly 20 years from small beginnings to a name to reckon with internationally; grown from selling cheap Chinese telephone instruments to mobile telephony to fixed telephony, broadband internet and DTH. A single brand, a single website -- but not a single phone number.
Why would someone doing business in the 21st century and listing outlets not give their phone numbers?
What does it take for a telecoms company to think of having a universal toll-free phone number that anyone wishing to buy its services can call, to be directed by an IVR system to what they are looking for?
Mass market services are often equated with fmcg, and services referred to as products. Years ago that not only sounded sexy, but also brought attention to the idea that a service had to be taken out to the user, not wait for the user to come to it as had largely been the case in India.
Now it only distracts attention from the fact that there is more to mass market services than making them available "within an arm's reach of desire".
For fmcg the store is first a stocking point, its overriding role is convenience of access, and anyone going to any store gets the standardised product.
The task of marketing is essentially to make the product available and attractive, and the brand experience lies in ownership and usage.
Mass market services, on the other hand, are largely invisible and undifferentiated in use: it is in the interaction -- at the store, or on the telephone, or the internet -- that the brand is delivered, by the sales assistant at the counter; the call center operator; or the guy who does all the boring detail on the website.
Marketers of products experience what they and their competitors sell, but marketers of services typically don't. Unless you call Customer Service or transact on the internet or at the counter, you will never know how your customer receives your brand.
The quality of products from cars to candy is increasingly, over the last several years, bench-marked globally; but that of mass market services is still bench-marked locally.
It's a circular relationship: customers' expectations of services are limited by what they experience (shaped largely perhaps by the standards of the largest service provider, the government); and the services they get only cater to their low expectations.
It is ironical that even as the size of the services sector has surged to over 50% of the country's GDP, its quality remains mired in the bad old days.
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First published in afaqs! (www.afaqs.com), 14 Jan 2011
