8/8/2019 When Companies Are Allergic to Status Updates

1/1

When noted blogger KirubaShankar had a harrowingexperience booking an airticket on a travel website,

it threatened to spoil his wedding an-niversary a short vacation toMalaysia with his wife.While the tick-et got booked,it was yet to be a con-firmed ticket. When he and his wifelanded at the airport,officials contin-ued to pass the buck, and eventually,after running from pillar to post,whenhe did get the tickets, the couple wasthe last to enter the flight,five minutesbefore take-off.

I was panting and awash withsweat. My wife was really hassled.This is NOT the kind of experience Iwanted to give her on her vacation,he wrote later on his blog, livid withthe travel website.

He eventually posted a tweet vent-ing his frustration.Thats when I re-alised the importance of Twitter. Youget to say what you want in quicktime.

Soon after, the co-founder of thecompany in question, Cleartrip, notonly sent him an apology email, butalso confirmed his return tickets,call-ing him up to tell him that he had dou-

ble-checked the tickets himself. The ic-ing on the cake happened when thecouple was upgraded to business classon their return flight.

Almost a year after the incident,Hrush Bhatt, founder and director(product and strategy), Cleartrip, rec-ollects, In terms of customer care,that episode was challenging, not be-cause we could not fix it, but becauseof the number of people to whom theincident was exposed.

Bhatt is probably right. Shankarstweets are read by about 56,171 follow-ers, and every tweet could be influen-tial in shaping or damaging reputa-tions.

Brand managers nightmare

The episode probably sparked off thefirst amongst many such customercare exercises on Twitter, when com-panies took note of what a single tweetcould do.Today,brands like Kingfish-er, Cafe Coffee Day, Parle Agros Hip-po, Vodafone, Bajaj Allianz, Flipkartamongst several others in India havewarmed up to answering customerqueries on Twitter.

The time taken to solve each querymight be different, but with Indiashowing the second highest number ofTwitter users in the world approxi-mately 3 million out of an active in-ternet population of 52 million it isacknowledged that a consumers frus-tration about a certain brand is only140 characters away from becomingpublic.

Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 2020 Social,reasons, Social media in general, and

Twitter in particular, is allowing cus-tomers to cut through the bureaucra-cy at big organisations and inject asense of urgency into the customersupport process. An irate tweet is like-ly to become more of a nuisance thanan irate complaint letter, and organi-sations are struggling to respond tocomplaints in real time,in public.

Manoj Damodaran who works withan online media agency, shares adilemma he faced with a telecom com-pany once, when he wanted his creditlimit on his cellphone connection to beextended.Repeated calls to the cus-tomer care helpline went in vain. Itwas annoying because the customer

care executive did not understand theurgency of my situation. I tweeted tothe companys Twitter handle ex-plaining my situation. They tookabout five days to respond,but whenthey did,I got a call from their head-quarters and they solved my problemimmediately.

Twitter is too open

But not manycompanies willwarm up to dedi-cated customercare on Twitter. Ex-perts say that Twitteris too open and brandsare insecure of cus-tomers washing dirtylinen in public.

Sanjay Mehta, whoheads social media agency,Social Wavelength, says, Theonly companies wholl handle com-plaints better are the one who chooseto do so.Most brands fear that their re-sponse to a complaint on Twitter may

end up creating a storm which theymay not be able to cope with. So esti-mating the resource demands, creat-ing a protocol, all these have to be inplace.Only then can a brand take on

the onus of responding to Twitter-based complaints.

Shankar says there are lessons inall this. Its natural to screw up.Butit takes courage for a company to ad-mit its mistake,He adds, A promptresponse and phone calls help. Ihavent stopped booking tickets onthat website.

c_arcopol@dnaindia.net

INDIAN INK

KALPISH RATNA

Travels with a brinjal

Just how Indian is English? In thisheadline from a leading nationaldaily, it sounds very nearly Greek.

House collapse kills 4:Owner built three floors after marryingher three sons.

Thats almost Homeric. Maybe Oedi-pus was one of triplets, the Greek ver-sion of Amar Akbar Anthony. The truthis a little more prosaic. A Hindi translit-eration explains all.Its just Apni An-

grezi.Only,Angrezi isntapni. It is French.

Europes first appearance in Indianmemory is as Farangistan, the land ofthose marauding Franks who sustainedthe bloody crusades next door for twocenturies. We knew the wordFirangilong before Vasco da Gama made land-fall at Kappakadavu on 20 May 1498.The

many Europeans pampered in the lav-ish courts of sultans and rajas were allfirangis. Whether their postcards homewere in Italian,Portuguese,Russian orSlavic, we,with our inherent xenopho-bia, only knew them asfirangi.

But the Englishman was subtly dif-ferent.The first to admit this were the in-dignant firangis whose ships were am-bushed by British pirates.They labelledthe pirate as Anglaise or Inglese. Andwhen he made land here,in far more gen-tle guise, he was quickly naturalised as

Angrez.Historians have overlooked the irony

ofAngrez. In the metaphor of IndianInk, it is onomatopoeia.Angin Hindiis limb, rezin Urdu is to erase or destroy.Thats four centuries packed into oneword.Angrez a self-descriptive his-tory of British India.

If A is forAngrezi, then B has to bebackpacker,a neat description, as everyword carries its very own knapsack ofstory.

I began this column while eatingbrin-jal. Now thats a word distinctly dated.

The purple emperor hitching a ride inyour biodegradable shopping bag can-not possibly be a brinjal. Your weekendfix of food porn should set that right toutde suite.Brinjal is strictly for the proles,

gourmands who glut on bhajiya andbharta. Haute cuisine demands nothingless than aubergine, a word easily asso-ciated with a quaint little village in

Provence or our villa in Tuscany.Aubergine oozes olive oil, fabulous stuff,not to be confused with the crisp bain-

gan bhajiya of the nukkad fry-out. Ifstreet cred is what you crave, nothingworks like eggplant. Only somebodywith a severely restricted acquaintancewith this vegetable could have named itafter an egg. There are egg-shaped whitebrinjals, or I would have diagnosedcolour-blindness too.

Brinjal is a purple tribute to thosevagile botanists, the Portuguese, whogot it from the badinjan of the Arabswho got it from the local Indian wordsvartaki, bhantaki,vaingana, baingan.

Badinjan became Spanish la berenjena,and from there it was a short step toaubergine. Our brinjal,like most thingsextensively Europeanised, is a Bongob-ashi, a fruit of Vanga,Bengal.

The travels of the baingan can bematched only by one other backpacker.Haji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Ab-dullah Al-Lawati Al-Tanji Ibn Battuta.Reading hisRihla, Ive pondered hisname time and again.Name and originare simple enough, but what of thepatronymic? What could Battuta mean?

In Italian, battuta is line or stroke,and our travellers father was a scholarin Islamic law, and perhaps the onlywriter in the Malilki hood of Tinji sardonically nicknamed Lines. Youthink thats far-fetched? In Tangier, cir-ca 1304, the with-it language was LinguaFranca, a mixture of Italian,Turkish,French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic.Clearly not Babel enough for young AbuAbdullah, who set out on a quest for di-versity that would last 24 years.

Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena imaginedthe moment:

Ibn e Battuta,pehenke joota,chal pada toofan mein

Kalpana Swaminathan andIshrat Syed write as

Kalpish Ratna

Poor customer service?Dont call, just tweet

On July 16,2010, the same day itannounced its social media pol-icy, the first of its kind for a ma-jor IT company in India, Infos-ys was already on the back foot.

This is not meant to be a gag on employ-ees. Its about protecting IP [intellectualproperty] and client confidentiality, ittweeted in vain, as a volley of negativepress from both within and outside theorganisation spread across the social net-working world.

The companys recent career restruc-turing policy, iRace (Infosys Role and Ca-reer Enhancement), which was initiallyconceived to avoid layoffs during reces-sion,had subjected thousands of employ-ees to demotions and pay-cuts instead. Thegrowing resentment was publicly aired onthe companys internal online forums andexternal social networking platforms.

An internal affairAnother IT behemoth Google Inc.,has alsohad its own social media demons to con-tend with. Rumours about Googles ruth-less laying off of employees whove leakedinformation about upcoming productskeep circulating,but are substantiated nei-ther by Google (the company refused tocomment when contacted byDNA),nor itstightlipped staff.

Last year, when the company gifted allits employees the much hyped G-phone, itencouraged them to blog and tweet aboutthe soon to be launched product. But oneemployee in an overseas office took it toofar.The company hadnt yet communi-cated the launch date to the media.But she

tweeted about it, and next thing you know,she got fired, says Rohit Parikh, a for-mer Google employee.

Parikh,however, also mentions the pres-ence of a vibrant internal discussion fo-rum at Google. Internally, theres no cen-sorship you can say whatever you want,but not so externally.And most employeesunderstand the difference.

Ironically enough, Infosys, which hasenthusiastically spearheaded the use of so-cial media in creating a free and fair at-mosphere for employee interaction, hasquickly had to face its unflattering conse-quences in the Indian context.

While declining to refer to a specificcase,Nandita Gurjar,senior vice-presidentand group head, HR,Infosys,says its morethe possibility of employees not perceiv-ing the difference between internal and ex-

ternal platforms of communication thatnecessitated the creation of a social mediapolicy. This policy is to make them awarethat even if youre talking to someone whoworks in the same project as you,you cantdiscuss client or company confidential in-formation, she adds.

Infosys employee Rajat Jhaveri believesthat if such an instance had actually tak-en place, the ruckus created wouldnt havegone unnoticed. Instead, he feels ex-changes between Infosys employees in re-cent times belie a far more discernable

trend since the recession. If you gothrough both the internal forum and on-line discussion boards on Facebook andother websites where Infosys employeeshave vented their anger,youll see its frus-tration with policy which is the predomi-nant emotion,and it has nothing to do withthe disclosure of client data.

Clearly, controversy regarding seniormanagement creates the most fertileground for a full frontal social media back-lash, as another Indian IT company,Satyam, discovered in recent times.AfterRamalinga Raju admitted to corporatefraud in January 2009, in the weeks fol-lowing,Facebook, Twitter and Orkut ac-counts across the world were inundated

with millions of jokes and jibes directedat the Satyam founder.And while Satyamemployees contemplated their fate on so-cial networking websites,the absence of acentrally located online discussion forum,insiders feel, only contributed to the sub-sequent confusion and hasty resignations.

As former marketing and communica-tions manager in Satyam, Prasanna Ku-mar reveals, just before the scandal brokeout, the IT company was actually planningto launch a brand new internal social me-dia platform. We were developing a social

networking tool that combined Facebookand Twitter, along with other elements, toenhance employee interactivity. After theMahindra Group took over, the tool was fi-nally introduced but internal uncertain-ties and severe attrition rates meant thatthe platform never took off in a big way.

My space vs office spaceAt the other end of the spectrum, Infosysofficially has an employee redressal sys-tem,an extremely active internal blog, anda policy discussion forum Myvoice, whichpurportedly sees 3,000 to 4,000 hits a day.

But thats not necessarily a good thing, saysAnil P, blogger and IT professional. Theidea that internal forums are very active isusually a PR gimmick. If it does happen,like in the case of Infosys currently, itsonly because attrition rates are rising andthere is a strong anti-policy vibe. In fact,Santosh,an ex-Infosys employee reveals,There were instances where the blogshave been shut down because of the in-tense anti-Infosys sentiments.

Consequently, for a majority of dis-gruntled employees, social networkingsites such as Facebook,Twitter and Orkutare a safe refuge from the prying eyes oftheir employers, many of whom place ahigh price on confidential client informa-tion.This is especially the case with MNCswho have clients in the banking,financialservices and insurance (BFSI) sector.

So how does Infosys intend to enact thepolicy given that its impossible to traceemployee online behaviour outside of thecompany intranet? Denying the possibili-ty of monitoring social networking web-sites through online surveillance tools,Gurjar says,Itll be through employeesthemselves that such cases will be report-ed. But once you create awareness,it willbe very unlikely that it will happen.

Vikram Thakar, IT Head, Hutchison 3Global Services Pvt. Ltd, offers a clearerguess, Lots of companies are on socialnetworking sites today through Facebookgroups and such.Im thinking people fromHR or the audits department whore al-ready members on such websites, will useit as a means to monitor status updatesand comments. But for now at least,thismay not deter most employees from con-tinuing to enjoy the greatest privilegesthat the Internet offers freedom ofchoice and anonymity.

Social media experts, on the whole,be-lieve a bit of respect and trust on the em-ployers part can help corporates reap thebenefits of social media without having toconstantly combat its negative effects.

Some names have beenchanged on requestk_uttarika@dnaindia.net

When companies are

allergicto status updates

Frustration with a brand

is only 140 charactersaway from becomingpublic

Savvy consumers arediscovering thatraising a stink onTwitter works betterand quicker thandialling a call centreand being put on holdforever, reportsArcopol Chaudhuri

Hrush Bhatt, founder of Cleartripchecking the companys Twitteraccount on an iPad Vipin Pawar.DNA

For disgruntled employees, socialnetworking websites such as Facebook,Twitter and Orkut were a safe refuge,away from the prying eyes of theiremployers, many of whom place a highprice on confidential client information

When companiesframe a social mediapolicy for theiremployees, is it reallyto protect confidentialclient information, as

they claim? Or is itdriven by a desire toprevent negative pressabout managementdecisions frompopping up onFacebook and Twitter?Uttarika Kumaranfinds out

Illustration by Ravi Jadhav

13MosaicCNN recently fired senior journalist Octavia Nasr for lamenting the death of a Hezbollah leader on TwitterMumbai, August 8, 2010