When ad-agencies build websites

CRM and Usability

I am an Airtel subscriber. And my experience with them (in Pune especially) has been horrifying. After ten days I get an SMS from them that said 'You have crossed your credit-limit please make an interim payment'. I was confused. I was never told about this credit-limit when I had signed up. So I made a call to the customer-support department. I have to tackle the Interactive Voice Response that so adamantly plays their ad jingle. And then there is this countdown 'Our customer officer will be with you in 90 seconds, 60 seconds' and so on. Finally a voice declares 'This is xxxx here how may I help you?' 'I am suman my mobile number is xxxx...' I tell the story. And the guy repeats verbatim what I told him and asks me 'is this the information you are looking for?' For a moment I wondered if I was talking to a robot or a trained parrot. I said 'yes.' and the guy comes back saying, 'sir it is our company policy...da da da' I said 'ok then send me the bill and I'll send you the check.' And he says, 'Sorry sir, bill can be sent only on the billing date.' 'So you want the money without even sending me a bill?' 'Yea.' Well. I paid up. This happened all over again within 2 weeks and I refused to pay. They barred my number. I made another payment. I AM YET TO RECEIVE MY FIRST BILL ! Can you beat that? I have made two payments and I haven't received even a single bill. And one fine day a 'client-relationship' executive called me and told me I can check my billing online. This is what happened:

• I visited Airtel World.com and was greeted by a picture-collage; the site doesn't mention its purpose or what it can do to a customer. Airtel simply has taken its current ad campaign onto its website so much so that the site keeps playing their jingle and yea no 'turn audio off' control was provided.
• I clicked on an image and was led to a page called 'consipire.htm' that held links to downloadable ad-campaigns ah well!
• I don't understand how a company can get so carried away by its ad-campaign; and make its website so difficult to use. So I wanted to check how Hutch had built its website. See it for yourself! It took ages to load and their punchline and a pugmark graphic follow my mouse pointer; I don't know who built their site but it truly comes across as if some school kid that had learnt HTML lately was given the contract; how can a brand afford to trivialize itself like this!
• Coming back to Airtel, I managed to find a link called e-bill and could see my billing information.

Conclusion

Agencies should act as partners to their clients. If my assumption is right and agencies had infact built the Airtel and Hutch sites... well, what can I say either the teams involved must have been stoned when they built the sites or they must have had a 'how dumb can you get' competition. Here's what I would have done if I had had to build the sites: 1) State the purpose on the homepage 2) Tell users what tasks they can perform 3) Ensure that the site loads fast 4) Creativity (in advertising) is about getting your client's cash-box ringing; I am positive the websites will not make a cash-register even whimper. Successful branding (on the web) will happen only if the websites in question offer some value to the customers; the least the sites could do is be simple and intuitive and unintrusive. Both Airtel and Hutch fail in that area. And if you are an aspiring web programmer and want to show off your JavaScript mouse-trailers you know where to go. write to me: suman at sumankumar dot com

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