In most cases, customers dial into call centers when they have a complaint and wish to speak to an executive. Unfortunately, when you dial in, the recorded voice always gives you every other option that exists before you can finally reach an executive. In all the cases I know, complaints always correspond to one of 6/7/8/9 on your phone keypad. So you have to wait till the end of the recorded voice message to finally get through to an executive.

In case of Tata Sky, they first ask you to either dial 1 for English or dial 2 for Hindi. I chose 1 for English. This was followed by another menu to identify if I was an existing customer or a new customer. Then came a long list of items – dial 1 for account balance, 2 for recharge, 3 for additional packages, 4 to purchase a showcase event; and finally Technical Support comes in at 5. After dialing 5, you need to wait for another 10 minutes – listening to different Tata Sky offers – before someone attends your call. Finally, when you get through, you are greeted in Hindi no matter what option you may have chosen initially. Frustrating isn’t it?

These systems are designed for poor customer experiences. Anybody who is calling in to complain is already unhappy with the service. Shouldn’t companies be trying to serve them quickly? Why not have Technical Support or Complaint Registration as the first option in the menu? Having it in the end ensures it is the last straw that leads to an angry customer.

Amita, a friend who’s currently in US, was playing around on Google.com and noticed that as soon as someone typed worko, they got prompted with workosaur as the first option. I tried the same on Google.co.in and again I was prompted with workosaur though it appeared as the seventh option.

Pretty good when you consider that you have keywords such as workout and workopolis (Canada’s top job portal) starting with the same string.

Prompt on Google.com

Prompt on Google.co.in

A few weeks ago Sanjeev Bikchandani (Naukri.com) wrote an article titled ‘Entrepreneurs are risk averse’ – which was met with wide-spread disagreement in Twitterverse. I don’t know what the fuss was all about. Ever since I have given thought to this subject, I have believed that entrepreneurs are not characterized by a propensity for risk taking. Entrepreneurs rationalize the risk they have to take and work towards minimizing them. Or they’d have no chance of making it.

As Drucker says in his book titled ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’:

I know a good many successful entrepreneurs. Not one of them has a “propensity for risk taking.” Most successful innovators in real life are colorless figures, and much more likely to spend hours on cash-flow projections than to dash off looking for “risks.” They are not “risk-focussed”; they are opportunity-focused.”

Or as Sanjeev puts it:

The point is – entrepreneurs have different goals.

Entrepreneurs who claim otherwise are just trying to flaunt characteristics that they’d like to be associated with and nothing else.

After months of research, data collation and number crunching, I have finally put together a first-of-its-kind Annual Salary Survey Report (2008-09) for Senior Professionals in India. The survey was conducted with the objective of providing senior professionals with data to benchmark their salary against prevailing industry standards within their functional area. Do download the report and circulate amongst your professional network.

• Findings of the Annual Salary Survey on Workosaur.com
• Downloadable PDF Report
• Embeddable Scribd Document

Unlike other job sites, Workosaur still hasn’t attracted the wrath of the sys admins. As a result, the patterns on Workosaur are an accurate reflection of the behaviour of job-seeking senior professionals.

Here’s a peek in to some patterns obtained from the Analytics package installed on Workosaur:

Some observations:

• Senior professionals search and apply for jobs more during the weekdays. This clearly indicates that they are searching for jobs from their offices and not their homes.
• Wednesdays and Thursdays seem to be the most popular days for a job search. One can infer that’s the time of the week when office-goers are bored with work the most. Hence, they are prone to thinking about a shift in workplace during this period of boredom.
• The time slot from 11 AM to 3 PM is the most popular time for a job search. People seem to be making the most of their lunch breaks by searching for jobs.

A friend of mine, Prashanth, just got a pup home and baptized her Princess Leia (Star Wars character). Having read up some trivia while creating the Workosaur Quiz section a few months back, I had learnt that Leia is one of the few (if not only) fictional characters who has an associated emoticon. She is represented as @-_-@ thanks to her trademark doughnut hairstyle. Obviously, Prashanth was thrilled to know about it and every time we chat online, we always discuss @-_-@ (his pup).

The Milk Moustache
Back in 2007, a dairy industry promotional group called MilkPEP started a campaign to evoke its distinctive milk moustache TV/Print ads (featuring Beyonce and her mother) through the medium of text messaging by adding a milk moustache to the smiley emoticon :-{) and trademarking the emoticon. While a trademark gives MilkPEP the right to exclusive use, am sure they’d like more people to use this in their text messages and emails.

A bunch (5-6) of us back in college called ourselves as cockroaches. Because our objective was not to excel at studies but to hang in there and survive and graduate and get placed. When you look at things from a survival perspective, life becomes quite easy. The pressure is off your shoulders. This approach/way of life has remained with me. As long as I can just about manage to survive as a startup, I am happy. I have no immediate expectations of huge traffic and huge money. Right now it’s just a matter of survival and I think am good at it. Will change gears, when the time feels right.

While walking/jogging/running on the treadmill, I play different games around the available metrics to move from one milestone to the other. For example, I decided to do 7 km today. Till 3.2 km (2 miles), I had no problems whatsoever. Then I looked at the calorie count and it stood at 240. So I pushed myself for 250 calories. Then pushed for 3.5 km as the halfway mark. Next, I decided to play 2 fast-paced numbers on the iPod and run till they played without looking at the treadmill dashboard. Then back to the dashboard counts. Some more mind games and I finally hit 7 km. Am sure most people who use the treadmill would be using such methods to reach their final targeted distance. And it actually works. Come to think of it, I have been playing such games with my mind in academics and in my profession. Final target and achievable next steps that get you closer and closer.