Between Rain & Work

It’s Saturday. Mumbai is in rains. I am finally home after 4 long months of tedious work. I am trying to read through an analysis off my Executive MBA.. My mind keeps on wandering. My eyes couldn’t keep myself out of looking at the screen. I am alerted by non-stop WhatsApp notifications and frequent phone calls. Out of the habit of responding in time, I couldn’t keep myself not addressing it. I am into After-sales industry.

I wonder, how does this gets inculcated in my productivity and in my own cumulative works? Will someone design an AI bot, who will logically respond to the complex uncoordinated issues that I keep getting from the field? WhatsApp has initiated one such facility. I think it’s not yet mapped enough. You require to know people in the network to address the escalation.The escalation could be of any nature. But it is possible to make a cateagory of it and simulate it in a code.

Company demands faster response. A manager is a churning machine, but it is not all of it. We work in real-time basis. Another day, I was booking a morning Uber ride for my wife and it got accepted after 5 minutes. I thought, great that she doesn’t have to run in the rain and she would be safe. The driver in the map kept on standing for a long time. He was abating the time and not coming nearer. After a while, the ride was cancelled. Guess that the rider wasn’t finding it profitable. I couldn’t complain much. I wanted a service. It was not given and although my time was wasted, I realised that this is happening all the time at the ground level. I believe, some manager at uber would be noting down all the cancelled rides and would be analysing it as one of their KPIs… I don’t think that an AI robo will come in place of him. Rather, it will help simplify the reports, analyse it better to make an informed decision. I look at the contrast of a customer awaiting a service, a manager reading the quality of service, and the space where transactions happen.

We are an Indian economy. There are 1.4+billion of us residing in the Indian territory. Majority of the Indians are earning their daily income from unorganized sources. We are most vulnerable from anything – election year, environment, price cuts, International wars, cricket matches and so on. Every year before the summer season, we ask the channel partners to prepare with their manpower. We do not tell them, that if we fail to deliver you the number of installations, we will compensate you proportionately. As a company, we take our profitability seriously. Channel partner hangs on the possibility of the things happening as informed, else he can any day bear a loss.

Some of the managers are at times stuck at fire-fighting these anomalies away. They get frustrated at the complex challenges being thrown at them. The normal reaction is, “What do I do with this? It’s not my job!!”. I think that frustration will come and with more data-driven approach, we will surely reduce the uncertainties in our working. However, it’s a continuum. Handling a volume coupled with complexities is something we get to learn at our job..