Thank You for Calling

Last week I called my credit card company. I had been charged for a late payment and I wanted to get that reversed. The gentleman who answered my call told me that I had been charged because my payment came in late. “But I dropped my cheque in before the due date!” I protested. His answer was nothing I expected.

His answer: “The payment should reach us by the due date, not your cheque. A bank takes three to four days to clear a cheque is something everybody knows. So you should have dropped your cheque in accordingly.” This was delivered in a condescending, soft tone after which he told me that he could do nothing about reversing the charges.

I reeled under this bolt of “customer service” for some time. After I recovered from it, I realised I had to understand two issues about the customer-seller relationship: 1) How much can/ should a seller expect a customer to know? 2) If the customer is at fault technically, who should pay for it?

1) How much should be expected of a customer in this case, for instance? Can a customer not confuse “due date” with last date for deposit of cheque rather than receipt of payment? We always tend to look at the story from our side. So a customer feels he has already “paid” when he drops off the cheque. I think a seller should take the trouble to understand this and issue the ‘due date’ accordingly. Holding a customer responsible like this, almost chiding him for being as stupid as to not know even this much about simple banking rules can only make him go away, not come to you. And can’t such a slip happen easily? Instead, just issue the due date four days earlier. To presume that your customer knows what is common knowledge to you, can be potentially dangerous. Doctors do this often. They presume you know when the pills should be had. I can recall a doctor I went to once saying that I should’ve known that if I felt nauseous, I could  have had a Domstal! It was my mistake- the patient’s mistake- to have not known it. Not his to have actually forgotten to write it.

2) The second part is trickier. In this case, how much does it cost to ignore this claimed error? And up to what point should a seller absorb the implied cost or loss? I had to tell this young man that I had been issuing cheques and dropping them off just the same way for over ten years that I held the card. Nobody had said this to me before him. He still did not feel the need to get politer. He only transferred me to Marketing.  The next gentleman calmed my ruffled feathers, quickly sorted the matter out and deleted the charges. He probably checked out that I had a clear history of payment for over a decade. He also probably knew I had, like any customer of my profile, another three or four cards in my wallet.

Letting a customer get the benefit of doubt and requesting him to issue the cheque a little earlier would have gone a long way, I think. His training should include this customer empathy. His training should include the learning that he has his job because customers pay their bills mostly on time. The polished pronunciation and accent is less important. Training should include teaching him not to make a conversation into an argument. His success lies in concluding the chat as quickly as possible, not proving to the customer that he is a fool.

Listening to a customer gives you the direction of progress. If he had listened to me then he would have heard that his bank had no drop box anywhere close to where I lived. If he had probed further, he would’ve heard that I now use another card more frequently because it allows me to make online payment transfers. But he wasn’t interested.

So end result: I use this card very rarely now. And I wasn’t surprised to learn that this big, international bank has had a tough run globally over the past few years with business slipping away. Maybe many others have been left disgruntled before me too.

Make a Left or Take a left?

My colleague, Charubala, who steers the language division of our little company, can talk endlessly on language. Her interest in observing how English is used by people of different generations, nationalities, backgrounds is very engaging. I will share a few nuggets with you here today.

One trend she observes in American users- people who like to simplify English and bring more logic to its confusing syntax, grammar and sentence structure- are the most forward in ‘verbing’. In our language programmes we encourage people to use verb forms of words to shorten sentences. The American users have taken it way forwards and made verbs of nouns that never existed when English for us meant British English. We all already know and often use ourselves, words like ‘access’ and ‘extract’ as verbs, even though they continue to shock classical users. So we now say, “I can access this data easily.” The classical use would be “I can have access to this data easily.” When I was in school I was taught that ‘extract’ could be a verb when talking of say, juice. You can extract juice from sugarcane but you couldn’t say that a poem is ‘extracted’ from a book. You had to say, “This poem is an extract from the book…” That’s obviously changed. Younger people may even be surprised to hear about such ‘primitive’ uses of words.

Some of the newer verbs she has been reading about are ‘helm’, ‘chagrin’, and strangely, ‘reverence’. So sentences from American publications and newsletters can read like “He helms this company.”/ “I was chagrined to hear about the delay.” / Today is reverenced as SuperBowl Day.

So then is there anything like wrong English? Languages undergo changes with changing social scenarios and shifting economic power. If the language is used alternately by an economic superpower, it is seen and recorded as a ‘change’ in the language. So we recognise American English as different from British English and then there’s Australian. The spelling too varies and an Indian language professional needs to know both the variants. But Americans can barely recognise British spelling and British users don’t enjoy American spelling. They like to use ‘programme’ and ‘colour’ and ‘manoeuvre’ among a myriad other words. Indian English, with its sheer growth and significance, has established itself in the literary world though business place English in India is largely American. But in India we tend to use a mix of British and American spelling, quite unknowingly. So most Indian users prefer ‘program’ but yet choose to use ‘neighbour’ instead of ‘neighbor’. We use ‘forward’ instead of the British ‘forwards’ but interestingly we use ‘backwards’ like the British do. So an Indian speaker will say, “Let’s take this discussion forward.” But he is most likely to say, “Let’s not move backwards.”

And amidst all this, how do we look at it if users of non-English speaking countries use English differently? Well, that certainly is counted as a mistake. Don’t you agree?