General
Bharti Airtel & the potential 1 rupee scam & fraud that could run into millions
I have an airtel connection and there has been several instances of ‘unwanted & unasked for’ services that have been activated on my mobile phone and 1 rupee of 2 rupees deducted without notice. This gives rise to several questions on the ethics of airtel & the potential fraud /scam that might be.
Here is an example of an SMS i received which showed an unwanted/unasked for service being activated on my mobile and 1 rupee being deducted. Some time later in the evening, I again get an SMS, this time for 2 rupees deducted this time around. I then call airtel where I am charged 50 paise to speak to the agent to talk about this issue.
When I talk to the agent, she tried brushing this under the carpet and said that i can cancel this if I want. She had no answer to why & how this service was started in the first place. I could clearly make out that the agent would have been getting several calls like that as she did not seem surprised at all and neither did offer any insight or intention to look into why such service was started without subscribers permission. She did not even offer regrets that this has been done and forget about offering refund and credit of the amount back.
Now below could be a very realistic situation:
This kind of a micro 1 rupee scams being played on millions of airtel subscribers and potential fraud being committed by cheating customers.
The reason I suspect this is that:
- Many people may just ignore this considering that this is just 1 rupee thing.
- Many people may stop this service and forget about this and not escalate this to airtel thinking why waste time on 1 rupee
- Many people not even coming to realize that such 1 rupee amounts are being deducted from their accounts
Anyone has idea of where this could be escalated and brought to notice for investigation.
It is really painful that a company run by Mr Sunil Mittal, who espouses to be the torch bearer of corporate ethics operates in this manner of cheating the customer — however the small the amount maybe. to notice. Anyone else facing such issues?
This is a breach of trust and trust once lost in a brand, by such behavior, is lost forever.
EDIT: A quick Google Search on this subject showed that this is indeed an issue voiced by many of the customers on various forums on the internet
Can organizations be designed like the rain forest? What can we learn from Rain forests?
These days, GREEN is the ‘in-thing’. Just like innovation; GO-GREEN, Eco-Friendly, etc are words that one would find in most organizational mission statements. The irony is that just like innovation, organizations seems to be clueless on what this whole ‘GO-GREEN, Eco-Friendly’ thing really means — beyond the rhetoric.
I would say that the first step towards that could be to learn from the natural environment around us. These natural surroundings are like living universities and can teach lessons that one can’t study in all the IVY league business schools combined. We just have to observe these natural surroundings and be ready to absorb, learn and apply those principles in business.
Seemingly remote natural systems like the rainforests can be a great place for organizations to learn from.
So, what can organizations learn from rainforests?
Some 15 years ago, Tachi Kiuchi (Member of the Board of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation), gave a keynote address to the World Future Society on July 19, 1997 around this topic that I regard as the best pieces of literature around learning from Rain Forests and what organizations can learn from rain forests.
Read it here:
http://www.isss.org/primer/asem30tk.html
Key Points that Tachi Kiuchi makes are:
- See & understand how a rainforest operates. How can organizations operate like the rainforests?
A rainforest is an example of a place that excels by learning to adapt to what it doesn’t have. A rainforest has almost no resources. The soil is thin. There are few nutrients. It has no productive assets. Yet rainforests are incredibly productive. They are home to millions of types of plants and animals, and more than two-thirds of all biodiversity in the world. Those plants and animals are so perfectly mixed that the system is more efficient, and more creative, than any business in the world.
- It consumes almost nothing. Wastes are food. Design is capital.
Today’s fast-changing business environment requires that we be alert, and responsive. Agile, and creative. To do so, we must structure our company so we are a learning organization. Not top-down, but bottom-up. Not centralized, but decentralized. Not limited by rules, but motivated by objectives. Not structured like a machine– which cannot learn– but like a living system, which can.
- Rainforests are a model of the perfect learning organization.
How can we begin? By operating less like a machine, and more like a living system. An Industrial Ecosystem.
- The most important Natural capital is its design. Its relationships.
In Japan, we have two terms to describe this: omote and ura. Omote is the surface or front of an object, ura is its back or invisible side. Omote and ura . External reality and underlying reality.
When I visited the rainforest, I thought: As business people, we have been looking at the rainforest all wrong. What is valuable about the rainforest is not omote — the trees, which we can remove. What is valuable is ura — the design, the relationships, from which comes the real value of the forest. When we take trees from the forest, we ruin its design. But when we take lessons from the forest, we further its purpose. We can develop the human ecosystem into as intricate and creative a system as we find in the rainforest. We can do more with less. Grow without shrinking.
- Differentiate.
Be yourself, be unique. In the rainforest, conformity leads to extinction. If two organisms have the same niche, only one survives. The other either adapts, or dies. In today’s economy, the same happens. If two businesses have the same niche — make exactly the same product — only one survives. The other adapts, or dies.
So what are most companies today doing? They are trying to be the one that survives. Cutting costs. Downsizing radically. Desperately seeking the lowest cost. We think it is much smarter to differentiate. Create unique products, different from any others. Fill unique niches. Don’t kill our competitors, or be killed by them. Sidestep them instead.
Be yourself, Be. Only then — after we differentiate — is it time to reduce costs, and grow more efficient. We have learned this the hard way. We sell millions of televisions, stereos, and appliances. We cannot compete by being the lowest-cost operator. Instead, we must offer products that are different, distinctive. We must choose and fill our unique niche.
- Be a Good Fit.
We used to say, “Only the fittest survives”. There is only one winner. But in the rainforest, there are many winners. The same can be true in our economy. In the old, uniform, monoculture economy, only one form wins, only the most fit survives. At least until a new invader wipes him out.
In this new, diverse, rainforest economy, it is not a question of who is most fit. It is a question of where we best fit. If we fit — if we solve a social problem, fulfill a social need — we will survive and excel. If we only create problems, we will not.
That it is an eco-system and not silos. In organizations we see one department not taking t another.
Why I did not opt for the LinkedIn 30 days free job seeker package offer
“By checking this box, you agree to the following terms. Your paid account will renew automatically, unless we terminate it, or you notify Customer Service by email (customer_service@linkedin.com) of your decision to terminate your paid account. You must cancel your subscription before it renews in order to avoid billing of subscription fees for the renewal term to your credit card. ”
Recently, LinkedIn sent out an offer where members could upgrade their account for a job seeker package for free — for 30 days.
Nothing wrong with this offer but as a user I felt uncomfortable with the terms and conditions and did not sign up. I do not know if I missed out a good opportunity to try out that feature of LinkedIn or not. However, I was just plain uncomfortable with the words on the screen.
I wondered what if… that email of mine landed in their junk folders? What if they said that they never received the email.. What if they said that.. oh you did not send it from ‘that’ email account… All kind of worst case scenarios came to mind.
Now, one could argue that LinkedIn is doing nothing wrong is is being transparent and upfront with the terms and conditions. It is upto the users to decide accordingly after reading them. But still, as a user I felt uncomfortable. I felt as I was getting tricked into this and the whole onus of getting out of this mess will be on me.
Somehow, most companies just talk about customer satisfaction as intent but their actions don’t go beyond lip service. I had sometime back written about Fake Smiles & Customer Satisfaction
So, what would have made me take the trial offer & and upgrade for 30 days? Maybe the terms could be like this:
- LinkedIn will send me a reminder XX days before the card will be charged. It will again send me a final reminder 1 day before the trial account expires
- LinkedIn will also show me a message on the web application when I visit LinkedIn
- LinkedIn will give me a web option to unsubscribe from within my account itself. The button/link will be somewhere on ‘my account/profile settings’ itself
That would have made my try the package without blinking. It would have gine beyond customer satisfaction into customer delight.
So, LinkedIn, if you are listening, please, NO EMAIL BUSINESS for cancellation. If you can build such great software, I am sure you can build a button/link/check-box for me to cancel the trial account.
What do you as readers think? Do you get wary of such T&C’s? Would you sign up or hesitate? What could LinkedIn do better?
Yes, slowly but surely, the machines are making the decisions for us…
Just like we can’t imagine a life without cellphones or internet; we can’t imagine an Internet without Google. Saying that Google is our personal window, a personal assistant to the information out there on the Internet would be an understatement. And we feel extremely ecstatic when we get the results we want to see on the first page of the Google search results. We love Google for doing all the hard work for us and showing us what we want to see…
Did you ever imagine that somewhere in this journey, Google has become more & more personalized for you and your Google & the Google of your best friend may be a lot different? Do you realize that slowly but surely, Google is taking over the gatekeeper role of what you see on the internet? Yes, even without you having a goggle/gmail account, even if you’re logged out, there are potentially 57 signals that Google might consider – location, browser, language, history, etc — which it uses to personally tailor your query results. Great, isn’t it? What more could users ask for.. You search for shopping your favorite DVD and the stores listed are near to your area, in your language…
There is an issue here and maybe we don’t realize it. All this ‘personalization’ is hard to observe, is kind of invisible to us and that’s why we don’t notice it. When was the last time you tried to check if your search results are different from anyone else’s? Google is not exactly forthcoming in how it does the personalization for us & what it means. So, this leads us to a scenario where we will see things on the internet that Google thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. Google is acting like a newspaper editor without our permission. Google is controlling what we see and read, and not the way it should be: the other way around. Google is the new gatekeeper of what we see & what information gets to us. We may no longer decide what gets in. And more importantly, we don’t actually see what gets edited out.
Maybe, those sci-fi movies where machines control the world are not far from reality after all..!!!
Read/Listen more on this subject here at a TED Video
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html