Kusum Choppra

In the "good ole days" if a customer had a complaint, he went and talked it over with the businessmen or manufacturer. Nowadays, entrepreneurs and corporate types do not like to converse or meet with customers. Hence the emergence of a brand new management category "Customer Care Service". These employees are trained to stonewall the customers, rather bludgeon them into silent acceptance of whatever the corporate dishes out to them. Practical experience has shown that the customer care department is the first to be outsourced to the anonymity of call centers whose employees are almost totally ignorant of everything except a few standard unhelpful phrases and sentences the purpose of which is that the entire financial burden of the inefficiency of the company must be borne by the customer for having committed the fatal mistake of purchasing the company's wares. It would be interesting to read this translated into corporate managementese.

How many of you have seen the new HDFC Pension Plan ad; the one in which this gent comes home and hopes that his wife has not forgotten how to sweep and swab," get rid> of that house help"; and that he will happily eat what she makes, " just get rid of the cook ". And then comes the punch line: all this is in aid of a little trip to Singapore, which makes Wifey all dew-eyed. Now my guess is that only a Man could have written this advertisement. Tell me, how many plus 50 women (after all, if he is retiring, even she must be that much), staring arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes and/or BP in the face, would go dewy eyed at the prospect of a return to back ache and elbow grease? In the cause of a week in Singapore? Did this guy even ask his wife if she was willing to the exchange? A week in Singapore against two odd decades of sweeping, swabbing and kitchen chores? And what does HDFC pensions have to do with this little dirty deal? After all it is the wife who...