D. Sampathkumar

The Indian BPO industry has to conceive of various scenarios and have tailor-made responses if it is to warrant to the world that the value proposition that it offers goes beyond immediate savings in labour costs.

"SIR, it says, please try again," said the receptionist at the hotel in Mumbai where I had stayed for the night. "So why don't you try again?" I asked. "Sir, actually it was the second time. That is why I am telling you," she said, her tone implying that she had done all that she could and that is up to me sort out the problem.

Now, that had me scratching my head a bit. I mean, I could not possibly tell her to try once again although you never know with these computer programs. They just might click if one is lucky. I have seen system analysts troubleshoot their way through program bugs by the simple process of repeating the command hoping perhaps to tire the computer out into belting out the correct response. I was checking out of the hotel using credit card and the bank, which had issued it would neither approve the charge for my stay nor actually reject it. Armed as I was with a card issued by another bank, I got out of what was turning out to be a sticky situation. I had by then visions of staining on the grinding stone or whatever physical labours these star hotels may have lined up for those failing to settle their bills.

The mystery of the card was solved after a little chat with the customer support executive at the bank. Evidently the hotel had swiped my credit card in pre-approval to the tune of Rs 30,000 for an earlier stay and so the value of credit purchases that I could run up against the bank in subsequent purchases had been marked down by that amount. As it happened, my purchases since then, the bank executive explained, had exhausted the ceiling the limit of Rs 60,000 and so approval for further purchases had been blocked. (For the uninitiated, I must explain that journalists if they are at all fortunate to be approved in the first place, do not enjoy a massive credit limit. Whispers in the industry have it that journalists, along with lawyers, rank only marginally above that of convicted felons in the pecking order of desirable customers for a credit card company!)

But why did the bank say, "Please try again" and not the more straight forward "request rejected" or some such thing like that? A little reflection then helped clear the mystery over curious choice of phrase by the bank. Technically, I was not in default of my card dues till then. So they could not very well reject the purchase request, lest I sued them for wrongful rejection or, worse, loss of reputation. But, then, this pre-authorisation of Rs 30,000 was hanging like an albatross around my card that limited my freedom. Hence as I suspected, the expression "Please try again" was a euphemistic way of describing my Trishanku status — of being neither a `defaulter' nor a `good credit risk' for fresh credit purchases.

Of course, this can be dismissed as a trivial piece of customer experience bereft of any significance in any larger sense. But, on the other hand, it may well have lessons for the country's service industry. An obvious implication is how good are we in offering real quality service as we compete with other nations as a centre of business process outsourcing? An answer to that question would lie in our capacity to conceive of all possible `what if' situations and have appropriate responses built into systems of automation or those involving manual intervention in any BPO opportunity that come our way.

My experience certainly raises doubts on this score. For instance, the questions that arise are from the situation described above are:

1. How did the automated system of credit authorisation clear the hotel bill for an earlier stay, which was well in excess of the Rs 30, 000 if the credit limit was Rs 60,000, as the executive at the card company explained? For, would not the bill, together with the blocked amount under pre-authorisation, have exceeded the sanctioned credit limit?

2. Is there a system to link up pre-authorisation for potential purchase and actual purchase so that former gets automatically cancelled once the actual purchase gets charged to the account?

3. Does the system have a memory of such authorisations if the transactions (pre-authorisation and actual purchase) fall in two different billing cycles, as it happened, in the instant case?

4. What systems do service providers (in this case, a hotel) employ to handle glitches in other systems that inter-face with their own customers? Should not the hotel have conceived of such situations and forestalled any inconvenience to its customers by making sure that the card company `unblocked' the earlier authorisation?

Maybe there are other questions too — the absence perhaps a reflection of this writer's ability to conceive of the entire range of `what if' scenarios in the hospitality/credit card business! But the point is this: The Indian BPO industry — be it customer support for credit card or the back office work of processing payroll accounts or some such thing — has to conceive of all such situations and have tailor-made responses if it is to warrant to the world that the value proposition that it offers goes beyond immediate savings in labour costs. As every consulting outfit in this space has pointed out, India's cost advantage is not going to last forever.

As GDP grows on the back of a booming BPO services sector, unit labour incomes have to rise as it is already beginning to do so. And with that must disappear, its cost advantage relative to another developing country competing for this business.

But if service providers in the country figure out all aspects of superior quality implicit in designing robust systems for the outsourced service then advantage stays within India for long. It is difficult to see how call centre jobs can migrate to other developing countries if the customer support processes are comprehensive in their structure and executed to perfection.

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