Is the iMint loyalty card worth it?

A couple of years ago I got a free iMint card because of my ICICI Bank debit card. I never bothered with it apart from getting mildly irritated with iMint spam in my inbox every week. Last week I got yet another iMint spam - "Redeem your i-mint points & get 100 BONUS i-mint points" - and I wondered, how desparate could they get!

I decided to dig deeper.

The Customer Satisfaction Survey From Hell

Reliance Infocomm - How clueless can a company be about customer service. Sample this.

The Background

My billing address has changed since I moved from Goa to Mumbai. I don't have the time (or inclination) to run around Reliance Web Worlds (with characteristically rude people manning the counters) with my address proofs to get the billing address changed. I don't care much about the hard copy of the bill anyways. I pay my bills online and just need a printout of the PDF to submit for official claims.

Reliance has a website which lets you view your past bills and lets you pay bills online. Which is good. Really good. But the problem is, downloading past bills doesn't work most of the time. So, I wanted my bill to land up in my inbox, by email, every month.

I had made this request in the past. I had received my bill via email once (last month), and now it had again stopped coming.

The Call

I called up *333, almost jumping in surprise with the extremely loud "Marathi karita ek daba" (press 1 for Marathi), waited for a decent 90 seconds, and finally being answered by a human.

Me: Maine request kari thi bill email se bhejne ke liye. Ek maheene ka bill email se aaya bhi hai. Uske baad band ho gaya. Kyun band ho gaya?
Reliance human: Sir, yeh number aap hi ka hai? Aapka billing address kya hai?
Me: [tell the old address]
Reliance human: Sir, aapka naam kya hai?
Me: [Tell the name]
Reliance human: To sir aapko apna billing address change karwaana hai?
Me: [edgy] Nahin. Maine yeh nahin bola. Maine bola ki maine email se bill bhejne ki request kari thi. Ek maheene bill aaya. Fir band ho gaya. Kyun?
Reliance human: Sir, hum email se bill bhejte hi nahin hai!
Me: [completely zapped and irritated] Kya baat kar rahin hain aap. Maine khud picchli baar request kari thi. Aapke supervisor se baat kari thi. Ek maheene email se bill bhi aaya hai!
Reliance human: accha sir, ek minute...
[and she puts me on hold. No music, nothing! The line could've been dead for all you know]
Reliance human: Accha sir, humne apne system mein note daal diya hai
Me: Mujhe request number dijiye please [that's one thing you should always ask for when you're talking to the Reliance call center. These guys are in the habit of not taking a request -- a fact that their supervisor has told me in the past]
Reliance human: Nahin sir, is cheez ke liye hum system mein request nahin le sakte!!!
Me: [completely losing it] kya bakwaas kar rahi hain aap... aap kya chahti hain, aapke supervisor se fir baat karni pade mujhe... maine khud picchli baar request kari hai... aur number bhi mila hai
Reliance human: [now on the defence] accha sir, ek min, ek min...
[more wait]
Reliance human: Sir, aapka request number hai XYZ

Finally! Though I still haven't gotten my bill on email. But stay with me, the best is yet to come.

The Customer "Satisfaction" Survey

[phone rings -- I recognize the Reliance number. I'm good at it]
Reliance human: Sir, main Reliance ki taraf se bol raha hoon. Humaari company ko Reliance ki taraf se grahak santushti survey karne ka contract mila hai. Sir kya aapne 27 Dec 12:03 pe Reliance customer care mein request darj karwayi thi
Me: Haan
Reliance human: Sir, kya yeh aapne khud kiya tha ya fir kisi aur ne aapki taraf se kiya tha...
Me: Nahin maine khud kiya tha
Reliance human: Sir, kya aap is survey ke liye apne keemti samay to thoda waqt nikaal sakte hain?
Me: [obviously, dude. I have a bone to pick!] Haan
Reliance human: Theek hai sir, toh fir prashnon ka uttar aap paanch ankon mein de sakte hai, 5 ka matlab bahut santusht, 4 ka matlab santusht, 3 ka matbal na hi santush-na asantusht, 2 ka matlab asantush, aur 1 ka matlab bahut asantush. Sir, kya aapko ankon ki jaankari ho gayi hai?
Me: Haan
Reliance human: To sir, humaara pehla sawaal, aapk poorna roop se, reliance customer care mein hui vartalaap ko kya ank denge
Me: 2
Reliance human: Sir, 2 -- uska matlab?
Me: [wtf?] asantush
Reliance human: Sir, iski wajah kya hai?
Me: kyunki customer care executive meri request lene se mana kar raha tha
Reliance human: Sir, aapka doosra sawal, reliance mein phone milne se lekar customer care executive tak pahunchne mein jo samay laga, usko aap kitne ank dete hain
Me: 4 - santusht
Reliance human: Sir, teesra sawal, customer service executive ke baat karne ke dhang ko aapa kitne ank dete hain?
Me: 3 - na santush, na asantusht
Reliance human: iski koi wajah?
Me: [getting irritated] nahin koi khaas wajah nahin
Reliance human: nahin sir koi wajah to hogi
Me: arre bhai, koi wajah nahin... har cheez ki koi wajah nahin hoti
Reliance human: nahin sir, aap 3, 2, 1, mein wajah bataayenge tabhi to mein yahaan likhoonga na sir.
Me: Mere paas wajah nahin hai... aapko aage ka sawaal poocchna hai toh theek hai... nahin to phone rakh raha hoon main
Reliance human: Nahin sir, aap na to santusht hai, na asantusht hain, iski koi to wajah hogi na..."

[i wish I could bang the phone down! but I had to make do with a simple click of the red button on my cell. That's a fucking problem with these cell phones (especially if you own them) -- they don't aid in anger management as well as landlines do!]

I was left dumbfounded. Seriously, is customer satisfaction so hard to get right? These guys are not even in the right direction!

Is stealing users a good strategy?

Zapak seems to have caught my fancy. I'm sure everyone would've seen the irritating (and offensive) "As fast as 1-2-3" ad campaign by Zapak. Close on the heels of that, I notice another web campaign from Zapak:



The first frame of the animated GIF has a purple Spidey holding up a placard that reads, "jumping_jack@tediffmail.com" (emphasis mine, apparent spelling mistake - theirs).



The second frame has the same purple Spidey holding up a placard with "spider.man@zapak.com" written on it. Why the dot, I wonder. Wasn't it about "reclaiming your name"? It's Spiderman, not Spider-dot-man!

I just don't get it. Zapak started off as an online gaming company with excellent advertising and marketing campaigns. I remember telling everyone about the "Get to the next level" campaign I saw in Adlabs loos. Or the "Your race begins here" campaign on escalators. Then it went off to focus on girls in gaming.

And then all of a sudden - free email? Which gets delivered instantaneously? Which is as easy as "login, compose, send"? I mean, wow! No one though of that before!

And then it wants people to reclaim their names on a website called Zapak.com? What would anyone like to give out on a CV - nanda_saurabh@gmail.com OR saurabh.nanda@zapak.com? And how long can you go along with this strategy? It's self defeating. You can have only one amit.agarwal@zapak.com or amit.singh@zapak.com. Your USP goes out of the window as soon as you have enough number of people signing up.

If you can't innovate at least don't try to steal Rediffmail's users. They have a phrase for this - "splitting the pie" or "dividing the pie"...

(Oh, btw, they've also launched a YouTube clone now - Zapak.tv)

Cheeni Kum: Review

Executive summary :-)

• "Cheeni Kum - A sugar free romance", that's what the movie adverts want you to believe. It's not. It's full of sugar coated dialogues and oh-so-irritatingly-sweet-if-I-were-a-diabetic-I-would-die kind of scenes.
• 5 out of the 7 truly funny scenes are shown in the movie trailers. You won't be missing much, trust me!
• Amitabh and Tabu share absolutely no on-screen chemistry. Every frame they share seems artificial. How can you have a romance without a sizzling chemistry between the leads?
• Amitabh is getting too repetitive with his loud monologues. You know, where he spurts out a long lecture, pausing in the end, almost cueing the audience for an applause. I'm sick of them. The movie starts off with one of those, "Khaana banaana duniya ki sabsi badi kala hai..." -- you've probably seen it in the adverts.
• The excruciatingly irritating kid, called "Sexy" in the movie will make you want to pull your hair out. Or stab her to death (in my case). I usually don't like the stupid kids that are there just for adding the cute element to the movie. And to voice heavily philosophical dialogues sugar-coated by their ostensible innocence and irritating lisp. For example, Ta Ra Rum Pum, Kucch Kucch Hota Hai, (insert any Karan Johar/Aditya Chopra/Yash Raj movie here)
• The movie is bloody long. In Bollywood, there is no excuse for making a three hour boring movie without songs.
  
• Delhi is NOT situated between Qutub Minar and India Gate.
  
• The plot had a lot of potential. The starcast was amazing. But surprisingly, the movie was a total fuck-up!

I had been waiting for Cheeni Kum, only to get disappointed. I'm sure people will still queue up to watch it, but atleast you'll end up lowering your expectations.

Zapak: How lame can you get?

Verbatim from an eDM (that's an electronic direct mailer for all your non-marketing and non-advertising folks, aka SPAM) by Zapak.com which landed up in my inbox today:

World's No. 1 Casual Game -- ZUMA

It's time to do the unthinkable
Beat the Sun God himself! Shoot the magical balls and stop the deadly chain from reaching the golden skull. Be quick, be smart. You gotta fight with your brains.
[...]
It's time to get tribal!
[...]

Hmmm, casual games. Never heard of those before. From the Wikipedia entry:

The term casual game is used to refer to a category of electronic or computer games targeted at a mass audience. Casual games usually have a few simple rules and an engaging game design, making it easy for a new player to begin playing the game in just minutes.

Right. And I get the beat the Sun God himself?! Whoa! Awesome! I'm just dying to do that. Especially with graphics like this:

And talk about "magic balls" and the "deadly chain". Preposterous. Sexually offending!

I just hope some random Surya Devtaa Bhakt Samiti finds this offensive and files a suit in some Rajasthan or Ghaziabad court against Zapak. At least the rest of us will be saved from having to go "tribal"!

I Run Maidaan...

After years of wait... after so much of hype... it turned out that a local college circuit band was better than the Beast! A classic case of ghar ki murgi daal baraabar!

Seriously, I thought Parikrama, who opened to Iron Maiden, were better than the Beasts themselves.

Maiden was opened by three bands:
1. F.T.N -- winner of some all India college band competition
2. Parikrama
3. Cauren Harris -- who?

F.T.N. were acting like a bunch of wannabes on stage. And I never quite liked the growling kind of music anyways.

Parikrama rocked with an all original line up. And the lead singer made a snide remark on the critics calling them a "cover band" at the end of their show. They're coming next week to Bangalore again. In an IIPM (yes, the same Arindam "Dare to think beyond the IIMs" Chaudhari's IIPM) college fest. Wonder who'll go to listen to them again!

Cauren Harris was a blood sucker. Straw laga kar ek litre khoon choos gayi sabka. She was like, Britney Spears Learns To Rock! The crowd was continuously booing her off stage with chants of "Fuck Off", "Fuck Off Bitch", "Cauren, Cauren, Who the Fuck is Cauren?" But she continued her torture for a full 45 mins!

After half an hour of that... Maiden came on stage to a cheering and ecstasic crowd. With blinking red lights on stage, and a sea of blue mobile phone hues in the audience. All jumping, craning, and stomping on the hapless fellow in front of them to capture THE moment.

Three new songs from "A Matter of Life And Death" which I did not know at all. Add to that a FUCKED up sound system. Seriously. I'm not joking. And I was not the only one who felt that. I had recently been to the Roger Waters show in Mumbai. And I was literally surrounded in a sea of sound. The sound quality at the yesterday's Maiden show was like a good quality college fest. What a let down.

I don't know. Probably I'm getting old. Probably my music taste is changing. Saala paaglon waala enthu nahin bacha in sab cheezon ke liye... But fuck I came down from Mumbai for just this gig. It was okay.

Indian Website Usability Report

JuxtConsult has come up with a report on the "user friendliness" of Indian websites. The Business Standard reports:

Of the 26 user-friendly websites, 12 websites - Shopping, Shaadi, Yatra, HSBC, Jobstreet, Ebay, Spicejet, Travelguru, SimplyMarry, Citibank, Reliance and Samsung - are in the ‘best practice group’, scoring more than 95 per cent points. Websites in the 85 to 95 per cent range qualified in the ‘user-friendly group’ included Naukri, Amazon, Bharatmatrimony, ICICI Bank, HDFC, NSE, Timesjobs, Rediff shopping, SBI, Indiabulls and BSE.

Of the remaining 95 websites tested, 45 websites’ (37 per cent) performance was average, qualifying in the ‘just about satisfactory group,’. This group also has some of the most popular sites, including Hotmail, Yahoo email, Gmail, Air Deccan, Jet Airways, Kingfisher, Monster, Jobsahead, Makemytrip, Cleartrip and social networking sites like Orkut and Hi5.

Nearly 42-50 per cent websites performed below-average and were classified in the ‘need definite improvement group.’ They included recently acquired website by Google, Youtube, besides online majors like Yahoo portal, Wikipedia, Indian railway booking site IRCTC, banking site ICICI Direct and content sites, Money Control and Times Of India.

Before I go ahead with literally bashing this "study", check out the way JuxtConsult has defined the "User Friendliness Index (UFI)" and "usability" (emphasis mine):

User Friendliness Index 2007 is a study to evaluate and classify top 121 highly popular websites in India based on their User Friendliness Index (UFI). UFI of these websites was calculated by evaluating them on 32 individual criteria grouped under 6 different ‘usability' aspects. The 6 usability aspects are ‘branding', ‘navigation structure and added features', ‘website design' ‘company and contact info', ‘contact responsiveness' and ‘technical parameters'. The findings compare each site's UFI score within their own individual category as well as against the entire universe of 121 highly popular websites on each of the 6 usability aspect.

The top item on their list of usability features is branding! Would anyone please tell me just how can branding be a part of website usability? Sure, branding can play a huge role in buiding website popularity and thus the user base, but surely not usability.

The second thing on their list is the vaguely named "navigation structure and added features." Kudos to them for considering the navigation structure of a website in determining it's usability, but added features? Any designer worth his salt will know that a multitude of features, does not add up to usability. Anyone stuck with a feature loaded mobile phone (2 megapixel camera, MP3 player, FM radio, games, bluetooth, infrared, etc. etc.) will know how fucking hard it is to send a simple text message or update the contact book. Getting to the much touted camera or MP3 player in a Nokia N70 which I happened to play with recently required much fiddling and up to five clicks! IMHO the "One button" Nokia phones were the most usable of them all -- Nokia 1100 being the best.

Sure, you can't roll out a product or website with limited or lame features. But blindly adding features over your competitions is not going to make your website more usable. This "Feauritis Curve" from the Creating Passionate Users Blog sums it all up:



How did "contact responsiveness" feature in a website usability study? Contact responsiveness or availabilty of customer service representatives can be used to measure a customer satisfaction index (CSI, if you please) -- but not a frikkin' UFI! The classis case is Cleartrip, where the website is miles ahead of its competitiors (Yatra, TravelGuru, MakeMyTrip, etc.) in usability, but the customer service (or contact responsiveness) simply sucks. That's because the customer care numbers given on the website are mostly engaged. Now, just because the customer care sucks how can you pull down the website for its usability?

(Disclaimer: I work at Cleartrip in the tech team. I know the customer care numbers are usually engaged because we are working with a lesser number of telephone lines. We will shortly be increasing the number of telephone lines after which, even that will change.)

Please go through the list of websites they have put under the 'just about satisfactory group' and 'need definite improvement group.' Yahoo email? GMail? Cleartrip? (Yes, that one's personal!) Youtube? Yahoo Portal? (THE Yahoo Portal? In the 'definite improvement group'? Who's tabbed homepage design is being poorly copied by the indian portals out there!)

And special mention to Wikipedia, which is in the 'needs definite improvement group'. It's a fucking Wiki! It brought in a whole new paradigm where anyone could edit anything on the web. It's in the 'needs definite improvement group'! I mean, what the fuck?!

And compare these to the list of "user-friendly group" websites --

• Naukri? (Hey, where's the job ad? Oh! It's there! Right among a gazillion other banner ads, and text ads! And oh, what's this -- I've got a billion new windows open?! Ah forget it, I'm just fine with this job...)
• State Bank of India -- I would request the reader to please go to the SBI website and search for the SBI branch in Lower Parel, Mumbai. Was it easy? Was it frustrating? Do let me know.
• Indiabulls -- the last time I checked many of my friends who had been lured into an Indiabulls life time free trading account were abandoning it in droves because of their utterly non-usable trading tool. (Runs as a Java applet)
  
• Bombay Stock Exchange -- Another website which forces the user to start of a Java VM every time they visit the home page. The bloody home page contains a Java applet. (Note: Java applets are bad, for starters, because they slow down the website from loading. And making the users wait is bad usability IMHO. Making the users wait for the home page to load, is harakiri! Try the BSE website here.)
  

The sad part about such reports is that many folks out there will believe them. And we will continue to get poorly designed webpages which clutter their homepages with flashing banner ads, do not work in all browsers, use proprietary ActiveX controls, have javascript which works only in Internet Explorer and use Java applets on home pages!

Had these JuxtConsult fellows gone through at least the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design before coming up with such a report, they wouldn't have put SimplyMarry in the top 26 most usable websites. I rest my case.

Air Deccan or Air Dhakkan?

Shankar's post on his Air Deccan misery prompted me to blog about my own horrible experience with Air Deccan. So, here goes...

My fateful flight, DN-603, from Delhi to Mumbai was scheduled to depart at 3:00 in the afternoon. At around 11:00 AM I get an SMS from Air Deccan that the flight was delayed and would now take off at 5:30 PM. At 4:00 PM, I get another SMS, flight late, departing at 7:30 now. At 6:30 PM we reached the airport and from the Air Deccan counter came to know that the flight was further delayed and would now depart at 8:00 PM. After some time another SMS, flight late (again?!), departure at 8:30!

One interesting thing that I noted at the airport was, that even though so many flights were getting delayed and/or cancelled, it was only Air Deccan check-in counters that had long winding queues, commotion, and total chaos. Just a sample of the cluelessness of tha Air Deccan officials:

Random DN-603 Passenger: Madam, yeh flight kitne baje take-off karegi?
Check-in counter lady: Aath baje. (8 O' Clock)
Me: Par mere ko toh SMS aaya hai ki sadhe-aath baje (8:30 PM) hai departure?!
Check-in counter lady: Hain?! Ek min zara SMS dikhaiye...
(I handed over my phone with the SMS on the screen, she scrolls through it).

Check-in counter lady: Haan 8:30 par depart karegi. SMS aaya hoga na aapko bhi?
(Random DN-603 passenger leaves with a confused, amused, bewildered, hairaan, pareshaan, look!)

After the check-in and security check was over, we were subject to an endless wait. 8:30 PM swooshed by. No announcement. No SMS. No information whatsoever.

And then, with a stupid magazine in hand (Men's Health! What the hell was I thinking?!) I slowly dozed off on the swanky new Delhi Airport chairs.

I was awoken suddenly to a lot of noise. In the few seconds between breaking out from my dream world and snapping back to reality, I realized that the noise actually was chants of "Air Deccan hai hai!" The entire airport lounge was taking out a morcha against the airlines! I was zapped! I mean, WTF?!

And today I realized that this kind of shit has happened before with Air Deccan!

Anyways, the flight finally took off at 10:30 PM amidst a lot of (sarcastic) applause from the passengeres and embarrased smiles from the air hostesses.

Primary moral of the story is, if the price difference is very little, dump Air Deccan. Secondary moral of the story is that at least these buggers SMS you well in time, that the flight is going to be late.