A date with a Bank
3rd of May, I joined Infosys among a batch of 200 MBAs. As a corporate deal, ICICI bank which has its counter within the Infy campus offered us attractive deals for almost all of their products. Apart from a salary account I happened to go in for a credit card offer. But even after 3 months of application submission and numerous escalation of the service request, I am still without a card.
Pretty upset with the service I was thinking over to apply to some other bank when an ICICI tele marketing executive called me up with a similar deal. Now, in order to check out the banks efficiency, I told her that I was interested in the deal and want to apply for the same. She promptly noted down my official address and residential too and told me that one of their officials shall contact me in the office by evening.
I was expecting a call from the ICICI bank counter in our office when at around 5:45 pm the ICICI chap calls me up and comes down to my residence to strike the deal. He happened to have traveled almost 15 kms for the same.
When I could have been given a service just 20meters away from the counter within the Infy campus, the company decides instead. It asks an official to travel 15 kms, waste around 3 and a half hours to strike a deal which it could have done within 6 to 7 minutes. Not only this, for wasting 174 minutes the company will also pay commission to this sales executive.
Further consider the opportunity cost of the official who could have instead approached and converted a few other customers within these 3 and a half hours.
In a world where competitive market is driving organization to check their operating costs, such acts of ignorance or negligence of the company officials might prove suicidal for the organization.
What I am still debating is the reason for such an act of negligence. The two possible reasons I see are –
Manish Saini
Pretty upset with the service I was thinking over to apply to some other bank when an ICICI tele marketing executive called me up with a similar deal. Now, in order to check out the banks efficiency, I told her that I was interested in the deal and want to apply for the same. She promptly noted down my official address and residential too and told me that one of their officials shall contact me in the office by evening.
I was expecting a call from the ICICI bank counter in our office when at around 5:45 pm the ICICI chap calls me up and comes down to my residence to strike the deal. He happened to have traveled almost 15 kms for the same.
When I could have been given a service just 20meters away from the counter within the Infy campus, the company decides instead. It asks an official to travel 15 kms, waste around 3 and a half hours to strike a deal which it could have done within 6 to 7 minutes. Not only this, for wasting 174 minutes the company will also pay commission to this sales executive.
Further consider the opportunity cost of the official who could have instead approached and converted a few other customers within these 3 and a half hours.
In a world where competitive market is driving organization to check their operating costs, such acts of ignorance or negligence of the company officials might prove suicidal for the organization.
What I am still debating is the reason for such an act of negligence. The two possible reasons I see are –
- Poor streamlining of company functions. It also suggests that as the organizations are growing their processes are not able to scale up.
- The reason which I feel played its role in this case is the employees keeping their personal gains over and above the company’s objectives. This also makes us go back to the basics of variable pay design and linkage to the performance. How much does it benefit and how much does it deteriorate the company’s value.
Manish Saini
posted by Manish Saini at
10:54 AM
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