Read some of my popular LinkedIn Pulse articles,
1. “CMO's Handbook: 9 Critical Challenges Faced by a Marketer”
2. “Innovation: 5 Powerful Lessons from Journey of an Inventor”
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If I was the VP of Product Development at Reliance Communications, I would regularly use my company's Reliance Global Call (formerly known as Reliance India Call) product myself to experience what my customers have to go through to make one simple phone call from US to Bharat. More specifically, I will,
Voluntary disclosure: I have not made any monetary profit from those referrals. I am just loyal to the brands I like.
I remember the time when we had to worry about all those calling cards and their beguiling fine prints. Then came Reliance Global Call (RGC) with its cohesive marketing message and simple business model: we will charge you $0.14 per min, no hidden charges, no connection charges, no minutes expiration. It was a relatively expensive deal as compared to what calling cards were offering but the USP was that I as a customer know up front what deal I am getting into. However, 8 years and over 100 countries coverage later it is not the business as usual anymore for RGC. Speaking in pure business language, Reliance should not hedge its laurels to economies of scale as being a huge barrier to entry, which no doubt it is, for new firms in this not so perfect competition world because the threat from substitutes and intensity of competitive rivalry is on the rise. What is RGC's boon today may be its bane tomorrow, unless the company innovates faster to keep up with times and improves its processes as I have suggested in this post.
Let us consider, for example, one of the threats for RGC: Substitutes. Today there are so many substitutes available such as email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo), text chat (Meebo, AIM, Google Talk, eBuddy, ICQ), social media galore (Facebook, Twitter), video chat (Google+ Hangout), audio chat (Skype), SMS (WhatsApp), MMS, VoIP (Vonage), etc. Seriously, we are much better off than our elders were who had namely only one alternative, postal mail a.k.a the snail mail.
It feels unthinkable if today I, as a long time "Internet privileged" being, have to contact my parents urgently and the only option available is to send the message through the snail mail. Hence, the reason for writing this post. Imagine this,
But this post is not about World Wide Web (WWW) or the Internet but about a company that has made a business out of Mr. Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the Telephone. On the midnight of January 26, which also happens to be the Republic day of India, I wanted to talk to my parents urgently about something. I tried RGC's Toll free number 1-866-373-5426, but no luck. To my surprise, I did not hear the usual hefty voice of some woman on the IVR, who never forgets to remind us customers at least 3 times per call: "Thank you for calling Reliance. Please dial the number you wish to call.". Every time I feel like saying, Oh come on lady, cut the courtesy and let me make a quick phone call. Anyways, coming back to the case at hand. That day, either the bell rang four-five times after which the call got abruptly disconnected or I got a busy tone. Same experience repeated when I dialed different Toll access numbers. Then I tried to call RGC's customer care number at 1-888-673-5426 but no one was picking up that phone number either. That is when I realized that there must be thousands of other perturbed customers with similar experiences like who must be trying to call customer care. No wonder no one was picking up that phone number, except once when someone did pick it only to hang up on me without saying anything. Ah well I said, Customer Care as usual.
Dismayed I diverted my attention to RGC's website, which was loading somewhat slowly than usual, or may be it was just me trying to read between the lines. Then I realized it was "the Republic Day" January 26 and I got a little worried. Jumping from News sites to blogs and twitter while hoping everything is fine back home. Well finally, the day passed and I talked to my parents on January 27. I narrated my experience to them and was in a complete disbelief, shock, and awe when they told me that our "we must censor the Internet" dictatorial-esque Government actually blocked access to the Internet from night before January 26 until late afternoon as part of strategy to prevent potential terrorist attacks. After knowing this, I suspected may be this was the reason why my call to India didn't go through. May be there was some government diktat to turn off international calls and Reliance was a casualty of Internet shutdown as they are a sort of VoIP provider. However, this is all mere speculation, as I do not have concrete proof if any of aforementioned happened. Nevertheless, if it is true and this is what actually happened then while I appreciate government's concern for the safety of its citizens, I doubt if this is the right way to celebrate the "Republic day" by denying the very "Public" their Right to Free Speech. I am sure there are much better ways to handle such situations than a blanket ban. So that there is Zero Loss to the public civil liberties and people may continue to talk on their 2G or 3G phones without threatening national security. Hope Mr. Kapil Sibal and Mr. Palaniappan Chidambaram are listening, no pun intended. Please do not make us go back to the snail mail days.
Again, this post is about RGC. The jury is still out on why I could not make that phone call that day. I do not know whether the government allegedly asked RGC to not allow any phone calls in and out of the country for a set period, or alternatively it was something more plausible such as a network failure or bad software upgrade that brought RGC's network down, at least in the US. In either case, RGC should have handled this situation better. Unfortunately, in neither case they, as a courtesy, intimated the customers of potential downtime. If it was a relatively implausible government censure, then as an international call service provider RGC must have been in knowhow of potential downtime beforehand. In which case, they should have put an advisory notice on their website and IVR for customer's benefit. If they did not know it beforehand and it was an unfortunate event such as a network failure then also they should have put up a message on their website and IVR. Many high customer transaction volume companies especially Banks such as Bank of America, Chase, et.al. follow this procedure all the time. It is basic courtesy protocol because what if software deployment to production servers goes haywire. Well ideally, deployment should not go bad. If it did then we have another problem to deal with in the organization.
Hence, following are my suggestions to fix some of these issues. If I was the Head of Reliance Communications,
1. “CMO's Handbook: 9 Critical Challenges Faced by a Marketer”
2. “Innovation: 5 Powerful Lessons from Journey of an Inventor”
====
If I was the VP of Product Development at Reliance Communications, I would regularly use my company's Reliance Global Call (formerly known as Reliance India Call) product myself to experience what my customers have to go through to make one simple phone call from US to Bharat. More specifically, I will,
- Have a serious one-on-one talk with my IT infrastructure head.
- Immediately hire Public Relations and Brand Management strategist, if I do not already have one.
- Ask my IT infrastructure head and PR strategist to work together for better customer experience.
- Immediately hire a new Product Manager and Development Team to revamp my current mobile software strategy, which I believe is causing more harm than profit to the brand.
Voluntary disclosure: I have not made any monetary profit from those referrals. I am just loyal to the brands I like.
I remember the time when we had to worry about all those calling cards and their beguiling fine prints. Then came Reliance Global Call (RGC) with its cohesive marketing message and simple business model: we will charge you $0.14 per min, no hidden charges, no connection charges, no minutes expiration. It was a relatively expensive deal as compared to what calling cards were offering but the USP was that I as a customer know up front what deal I am getting into. However, 8 years and over 100 countries coverage later it is not the business as usual anymore for RGC. Speaking in pure business language, Reliance should not hedge its laurels to economies of scale as being a huge barrier to entry, which no doubt it is, for new firms in this not so perfect competition world because the threat from substitutes and intensity of competitive rivalry is on the rise. What is RGC's boon today may be its bane tomorrow, unless the company innovates faster to keep up with times and improves its processes as I have suggested in this post.
Let us consider, for example, one of the threats for RGC: Substitutes. Today there are so many substitutes available such as email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo), text chat (Meebo, AIM, Google Talk, eBuddy, ICQ), social media galore (Facebook, Twitter), video chat (Google+ Hangout), audio chat (Skype), SMS (WhatsApp), MMS, VoIP (Vonage), etc. Seriously, we are much better off than our elders were who had namely only one alternative, postal mail a.k.a the snail mail.
It feels unthinkable if today I, as a long time "Internet privileged" being, have to contact my parents urgently and the only option available is to send the message through the snail mail. Hence, the reason for writing this post. Imagine this,
- I have to first find a spare sheet to scribble my thoughts on it. Why? Since there is no cut, copy, paste option available in this alternative and I do not want to strikeout lines on actual letter in case of a mistake. This is what dependence on technology does to a person.
- Find a good sheet of paper to actually pen my letter.
- Find an envelope.
- Go to post office and buy stamps. Since post office is going out of business, so I really have to find one first.
- Mail the letter and wait for them to receive it in 2-3 weeks.
- Then wait for another 2-3 weeks for them to mail back a reply.
But this post is not about World Wide Web (WWW) or the Internet but about a company that has made a business out of Mr. Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the Telephone. On the midnight of January 26, which also happens to be the Republic day of India, I wanted to talk to my parents urgently about something. I tried RGC's Toll free number 1-866-373-5426, but no luck. To my surprise, I did not hear the usual hefty voice of some woman on the IVR, who never forgets to remind us customers at least 3 times per call: "Thank you for calling Reliance. Please dial the number you wish to call.". Every time I feel like saying, Oh come on lady, cut the courtesy and let me make a quick phone call. Anyways, coming back to the case at hand. That day, either the bell rang four-five times after which the call got abruptly disconnected or I got a busy tone. Same experience repeated when I dialed different Toll access numbers. Then I tried to call RGC's customer care number at 1-888-673-5426 but no one was picking up that phone number either. That is when I realized that there must be thousands of other perturbed customers with similar experiences like who must be trying to call customer care. No wonder no one was picking up that phone number, except once when someone did pick it only to hang up on me without saying anything. Ah well I said, Customer Care as usual.
Dismayed I diverted my attention to RGC's website, which was loading somewhat slowly than usual, or may be it was just me trying to read between the lines. Then I realized it was "the Republic Day" January 26 and I got a little worried. Jumping from News sites to blogs and twitter while hoping everything is fine back home. Well finally, the day passed and I talked to my parents on January 27. I narrated my experience to them and was in a complete disbelief, shock, and awe when they told me that our "we must censor the Internet" dictatorial-esque Government actually blocked access to the Internet from night before January 26 until late afternoon as part of strategy to prevent potential terrorist attacks. After knowing this, I suspected may be this was the reason why my call to India didn't go through. May be there was some government diktat to turn off international calls and Reliance was a casualty of Internet shutdown as they are a sort of VoIP provider. However, this is all mere speculation, as I do not have concrete proof if any of aforementioned happened. Nevertheless, if it is true and this is what actually happened then while I appreciate government's concern for the safety of its citizens, I doubt if this is the right way to celebrate the "Republic day" by denying the very "Public" their Right to Free Speech. I am sure there are much better ways to handle such situations than a blanket ban. So that there is Zero Loss to the public civil liberties and people may continue to talk on their 2G or 3G phones without threatening national security. Hope Mr. Kapil Sibal and Mr. Palaniappan Chidambaram are listening, no pun intended. Please do not make us go back to the snail mail days.
Again, this post is about RGC. The jury is still out on why I could not make that phone call that day. I do not know whether the government allegedly asked RGC to not allow any phone calls in and out of the country for a set period, or alternatively it was something more plausible such as a network failure or bad software upgrade that brought RGC's network down, at least in the US. In either case, RGC should have handled this situation better. Unfortunately, in neither case they, as a courtesy, intimated the customers of potential downtime. If it was a relatively implausible government censure, then as an international call service provider RGC must have been in knowhow of potential downtime beforehand. In which case, they should have put an advisory notice on their website and IVR for customer's benefit. If they did not know it beforehand and it was an unfortunate event such as a network failure then also they should have put up a message on their website and IVR. Many high customer transaction volume companies especially Banks such as Bank of America, Chase, et.al. follow this procedure all the time. It is basic courtesy protocol because what if software deployment to production servers goes haywire. Well ideally, deployment should not go bad. If it did then we have another problem to deal with in the organization.
Hence, following are my suggestions to fix some of these issues. If I was the Head of Reliance Communications,
- I will have a serious one-on-one talk with my IT infrastructure head. I will ask him,
- Has he implemented an infrastructure that supports Five Nines availability standards? Five Nines means High availability or 99.999% availability of services, when the downtime is less than 5.26 minutes per year.
- What is the expected down time per year for the system?
- What is the contingency plan in case of software or network failure?
- What are call drop rates for past 5 years?
In the past 2 years while using Reliance I have noticed that the call drops have gone up to 15%. How do I know? To figure this out I did a statistical experiment. I kept a count of total number of call drops during 400 random calls that I made in past 2 years. I suspected that RGC's call drop rate was 10% i.e. 1 in every 10 calls would be dropped. After gathering the above-mentioned sample data, I did a statistical null hypothesis test on population proportion to verify if the call drops have been increasing. As per my sample, I found statistical evidence with p-value of 0.00043423 to prove that call drop rate had risen to 15% in past two years at 0.01 level of significance. I believe 15% is a high call drop rate.
One annoying thing I noticed while experimenting was that as a customer I do not even know if call drop happened because of a network failure or because my balance became Shunya. So I had to account for that. Wouldn't it be awesome if RGC gave us a forewarning that hey your balance is almost Shunya, so hurry up with that conversation. Cannot resist mentioning how many times a person on the other side has misunderstood that I hung up on them. I understand that call dropping may not be considered a big deal in India but that does not mean we should not aim for higher standards. - I will immediately hire Public Relations and Brand Management strategist, if I do not already have one. Let us be real,
- How many companies are on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. for actually engaging customers? Not allot.
- How many companies are using these platforms for real two-way communication? Not allot.
- How many companies are on these networks because these networks are fad of the day or because their competitor is on it? Many.
Well RGC is one of them. Someone at this organization has a misconception that branding your product on Social Media means to upload a photo album on Facebook of random people talking on phone and then announce it on Twitter. As if that will make customers flock to RGC's Facebook profile page and wanting to buy their product. I am sorry but this is not customer engagement using Social Media. In fact, RGC is not the only one doing it this way. Many other organizations have still not understood and optimized the power of Social Media integration.
I posted 6 photos on Facebook in the album "Reliance Global Call" fb.me/1tTHfGOLo
— Reliance Global Call (@Global_Call) February 17, 2012
Take for another example RGC's twitter account. Like a parrot it keeps on asking you to download their mobile app as if it is the deal of the century.
Connect without dialling Access Numbers or PINs with 'Express Dial'. Connect hassle free with Reliance Global... fb.me/UnIqRTSx
— Reliance Global Call (@Global_Call) January 25, 2012
I am not saying that RGC should not promote their Android or iPhone app. They absolutely should do so. But that is not the only thing they should do. They should engage the customer. Make it a two-way conversation. Come up with some deals. Reply to customer's gripes.
When RGC was down on January 26, they could have posted a tweet announcing the downtime. All it would have taken is less than 140 characters and they would have had many relieved customers. Another issue is that RGC's homepage needs a revamp. More than a SEO upgrade it needs a serious usability restructuring. Why they need to and what they may do to fix it is something I will prefer not to comment on this public post. - I will ask my IT infrastructure head and PR strategist to work together for better customer experience. I do not need to rehash what I have already mentioned in 1) and 2) above, but these two entities should work together to send a consistent message to customers in case of downtimes and of course to improve the brand.
- I will immediately hire a new Product Manager and Development Team to revamp our current mobile software strategy, which I believe is causing more harm than profit to the brand. This one is more close to heart than any other issues that I have come across while analyzing RGC because of my experience with Mobile technology domain. Sample this comment from one of RGC's customers Vivek on Android Market,
Horrible piece of crap. I'm pretty confident that the designers of this app were half brain monkeys dabbling in programming for the first time.
Here is another comment from Nirav,Very poor app. Can't believe that such a giant company can't develop simple app. Very shamefull.
Mind you that these are latest comments from users on Android Market for the RGC app version 3.16. This means that this app must have gone through beta, version 1.xx, version 2.xx to reach 3.16 to generate such adverse comments. At the time of writing of this post Reliance Express Dial app on Android Market had a rating of 2.5/5 (41 total ratings) and had been downloaded between 5000-10000 times. I haven't even started mentioning iPhone or iPod Touch users yet. Here is Sajenm's comment on iTunes storeWorst app ever. I cannot believe an app like this is released. Clunky, freezes, unusable. The developer needs to be fired
Here is another one, rkp_21 saysStupid app. I was expecting that it would at least dial the reliance number on it's own. If I have to so the same thing I do without the app what am I getting in the app. The website claims it is worth 20 usd for this crap. Yeah Right!
At the time of writing of this post, Reliance Exprees Dial app on iTunes store had a rating of 1.5/5 (242 total ratings). Compare customer's reaction to how RGC advertises its mobile apps on homepageNo more dialing numerous digits to get through your international calls. One touch Mobile application. This unique application worth USD 20 is currently being offered absolutely FREE! Hurry! Download now!
Well, we must hurry then. As one of the customers has pointed out we still have to dial the whole reliance phone number to make a phone call, which neither means "No more dialing numerous digits" nor does it means that this is "one touch mobile application". This clearly shows a divide between what is being developed and what is being advertised.
A clear over value of product like above sometimes shows mismanagement of cost estimates. By the way, who came up with such marketing gimmick? A $20 value app, absolutely free for you. What is this a telemarketing or home shopping network advertisement? I believe it is better to delay release of the app than to rush an underdeveloped app into production because once it is out in customer's hands and they start publicly criticizing it on official download forums, then it will be a huge uphill task and a PR challenge to recover from such brand damage.
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