The World according to OVL

Yes, I attended both this year. Incidentally I was there at TIE ISB Connect last year as well. It’s amazing how there is always a really pretty girl dressed very chic, who is the student coordinator for services

There are a myriad differences. Let’s start with the basics:

TIE ISB has lots more suits, better food, more deserts, more people in general and definitely a much higher net worth per head on average, not to mention age.

The event is purely for profit and reeks of it. It is a very honest, straight forward event. The speakers who come in are top notch in their fields. Most speeches/presentations deserve ovations. It’s professional.

The event has lots of people looking for a few VCs, to corner, and talk about their company and things they do. It is purely networking oriented.

The technology talks involve no code but rather a recount of what has happened in the recent past and a few people playing Nostradamus about the field. More often than not, since they are the guys who are putting money where their mouth is (either as VCs or entrepreneurs), it’s true.

I thought FOSS guys were determined, but I have met certain entrepreneurs with such grit and determination, it’s almost insane. There are people who are working without funding for the last 4 years! From what I hear, the VCs are chasing them now.

FOSS.in that way, for a non-programmer was not all that great. Since I have a tech background, I could understand a few things they said, but that’s about it. I could engage in conversations with the contributors of Mozilla and Openoffice but it was more at a level that looked at what is happening and what will happen to the usage, user-friendliness and such of the products.

Very honestly, it seemed that the event had double standards – one of playing the do-good, open-source promoting kind and the other where large and small corporates promote themselves shamelessly. I will not even spare the open source communities who promote themselves shamelessly. While there was an air of contribution going around everywhere, there definitely was an air of marketing going around too! It’s almost like they were hot and cold currents that kept the system going and the people rotating from one place to another!

Some of the talks were fantastic. Some speakers were phenomenal, but on the whole it was a little too dry for me and I definitely could not contribute anything there!

It was an event where I believe every open source product/project was being shamelessly promoted to attract scores of programmers/users to flock to it and contribute. It’s no different from services marketing except these are free services (obviously numbers matter to them too… their funding is linked to it!).

At the TIE ISB connect, people really did want to connect, meet each other. Entrepreneurs wanted to share ideas, build on each others thoughts. At FOSS.in, I really did not find too many people engaged in thought exchange as such. There was more discourse on other general things rather than idea generation and such. Unless the primary contributors of the project (i.e. employees) asked for and were patient enough to listen to feedback and suggestions, there were barely any exchanged. Several talks were more like reports of what had been happening for the past 6 months than anything else.

I was speaking to my friend the other day about customer service and and service design. I even gave him a little book to read. Since then I suppose even I have been passively observing customer service and service design.  Here are a few glaring examples of what I call absolutely idiotic service design/practice:

1)  Sabse Saste Din – yes it is a great idea from a great group. Unfortunately the implementation and I believe a lack of thought (service design) ends up in huge hassle for the customers. I happened to visit the Ameerpet Big Bazaar on the last day (Jan 27th). One of the first things a customer needs is either a shopping cart or a basket. Neither of these were near the entrance. Instead, they were all outside the exit (where once the shopper went, was not allowed in through there!) So finding a shopping cart was essentially a harrowing task which took me literally 45 minutes! I shopped for 30 minutes to get everything I wanted. Then I wanted to get billed. Out of the 5 cash counters only 2 were functional. Obviously, there was no queue – the scene was like a typical late 80s movie scene of the women at the water pipe. Whosoever pushed the most and shouted the loudest got to go first in line. (Strangely or not so strangely, it was the women above 40 years who were involved in this!). After standing for almost 45 minutes and literally pushing myself to the front of the queue, I managed to get out unscathed!

The shopping experience was 45 minutes – search for a shopping cart, 30 minutes shop, 45 minutes – stand at a billing counter – out of a total 2 hours only 25% was productive! That’s insane by any measure and even the most naive person can tell u that it is ridiculous. I saw people standing in line for 45 minutes who had bought just 1 item ( a bucket – with which u got another free!) I can not fathom their productivity numbers!

I will not even begin to talk about the lack of customer representative at high traffic locations, not to mention the absolute lack of knowledge about how much discount each product carried (we had to find that out at the billing counter!). Just imagine standing in line with 10 people pushing u, only to realize that u are not actually getting a 50% discount on the product, it’s only when u purchase 6 of them that u do!

Well, that is an Indian shop, we can assume that they are still learning, their technology is not all that great, their thought process for service design, touch points etc. is not all that mature.

2) Today I had dinner at Subway. Yes, the world leader in sandwiches – that Subway. We are a regular at that place. In fact my friend is so regular, I think they’d miss him direly if he din’t go for a week. If they have a good CRM practice in place, I wouldn’t be surprised if they called up to say, “There is some unusual activity on your credit card!” ( A line I borrowed from the conversation between the credit card company and Rachel from Friends, when she stops using her dad’s credit cards!).

They have a redeemable coupon system… give 8 coupons and when u order ur next sandwich and a large drink, another sandwich/salad is free.  Note: The large drink has to be an aereated one and not iced tea, which I usually drink. Although it was common practice for other Subway outlets in the city to allow people to take Iced Teas instead of aereated drinks, here they began to complain. Not cuz they couldn’t give it, but cuz the billing system wouldn’t accept it! A large iced tea actually costs INR 5 more than a large aereated drink. For the system not to allow it is ridiculous! Of course, we being the resourceful, rule bending Indians that we are, manage to go around anything. So, their service was exactly the way i wanted it to be… but the issue is that their existing system did not allow it to begin with.

It suprises me that the place where the customers interact most and most importantly with any company is their Billing system and it happens to be the shittiest written software. Probably cuz it is legacy and that’s why we have literally thousands of Indian programmers making a living from writing billing software and maintaining billing software. I know of atleast 7-8 large companies that have billing software teams the size of small companies.  It’s great for these companies and individuals, but it sucks for the billions of customers who have to face crappy billing systems on a daily basis!

Seems like there is ample business opportunity here for new entrepreneurs to take up the challenge to build systems that can work well with the companies’ marketing strategies.