The Other Side of the Coin - The PQRS of Redressal

If you accept the four 'rights' for a complainant, then perhaps the PQRS of redressal (catchy title - check, bullets - check, simple once you've read it - check, absurdly familiar to someone else you repeat this to - check) might also be worth spending some time on. 

Disclaimer: No theorists were mangled, misquoted or otherwise publicized in creating the material for this approach. 

P for Process and Possession

• Process: Keep the process as simple and clear-cut for your stakeholders as possible. The simpler and more direct the process, the better - if I have to push ten buttons for ten different menu choices in an IVRS when I am already displeased, or if I have to find my way through a convoluted system of reportees and authorities to air my grievance, you make an already bad situation worse. In the first case, I get frustrated to the point I do not give you the chance to even hear me out. In the second case, I am sharing my side of the story, unopposed, to every keg in the wheel before I get to the right person - which means that even internally, your image takes a hit. Imagine an employee who wants to complain about discrimination in the workplace. A single, aimless/fruitless iteration through a single department will yield you three more employees who will start to think they are also being discriminated against.
• Possession: Once you have the complaint before you, take ownership of the issue. Nothing can be more infuriating to a complainant than to see the complaint being orphaned. In back-end service organizations, the easiest tickets are often bastardized with multiple claimants - or in sales, where people vie for the easiest/least troublesome accounts/complaints - and at the end, you have someone who's stuck with complaints he does not want to handle. It is important that the issues be owned by someone who actually wants to see a resolution - and if that is not you, then the complaint shouldn't have come to you in the first place.

Q for Quest and Questioning

• Quest: Once a complaint has been received, the effort to resolve it should resemble a quest. A passionate, committed, no-stone-left-unturned approach that requires end-to-end ownership and the ability to view the picture at all levels. It is akin to strategy, where your destination is as important as your starting point, for the simple reason that your destination then forms the starting point for the next round. A customer might be willing to accept failure if he knows that sincere efforts were expended, but if nothing went in... then nothing comes out.
• Questioning: Common fallacies in issue resolution are the anchoring and recency effects. Anchoring is when you accept the complainant's version and proceed on that basis - and the complaint might just as well be a CYA (cover your a$$) measure as a genuine grievance. It's in fact a lose-lose situation - on a genuine complaint, if you fail to explore all alternatives, you may not realize what actually went wrong or where your system failed; if you operate on an erroneous foundation, you end up wronging someone else. Remember all those times you went crying to your mother about how Shyam, your next-door neighbour, pushed you down... after you'd kicked him in the shin, called him names and let the air out of his cycle?
  Recency is when you keep getting swayed by every new piece of information or opinion you come across. This is usually a medical condition found in people who hold leadership positions without having done anything to deserve being there. Like politicians and your next boss.

R for Refine and Reserve

• Refine: From the catchall approach above, there will come a time when you will need to hunker down and isolate the issues immediately relevant. A sexual harassment suit brought against a senior employee usually starts with the caveat of 'guilty until proven innocent' (mainly because the legal risks are too great for an organization to suppose otherwise), interviewing other employees who may have faced the same situation, determining if this was a one-off incident or a part of a pattern of abuse, the reasons for the same... You need to pour everything into a funnel and then use filters to get rid of the noise around the issue.
• Reserve: Refining the crude gets you the starting point for recovery. At the same time, just as you don't cross a road without looking in both directions (even - or should I say especially - on one-way streets in India), you still cannot afford to jump the gun and run naked through the streets shouting Eureka (granted, I am probably overdoing it with the metaphors just a little bit here!) Hold your judgement and try to validate it with other indicators if possible. Remember Muphy's law.

S for Solve and Sanitize

• Solve: Finally, address the concerns of the complainant and provide a solution that satisfies the actual aggrieved party. Whoever that is. The whole effort is wasted if the beneficiaries of your judgement do not become beneficiaries of its execution. If I find out that my employee over-billed my client - who complained - and I still defend him or choose to stay quiet on the issue, that client is going to take his business somewhere else next time.
• Sanitize: The benefit of redressing a complaint is that it allows you to plug weak spots in your own value delivery system. Whether it's an employee, a customer or a shareholder who's been wronged, it's in my best interests to sanitize the system so that the same issue does not crop up again - or, if it did, there is a faster route to resolution.
  Why would it be beneficial? Obviously, so that I will not have to spend my time and efforts on the same thing all over again. And perhaps not so obviously, I might be at the receiving end myself some time in future. 

So there you have it - the PQRS of complaint redressal. It tells you nothing you already didn't know, especially the order of the alphabets (I had originally intended this to be SPQR, with different expansions, but decided it might have been too confusing for some). Will it help you in retaining your customers, your employees, your shareholders or your spouse? Maybe... but it should certainly go a long way towards making you sound wise and managerial. 

Which, as Keats once wrote, 

... - that is all 

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The Four Rights for a Complainant

Disclaimer: In the manner of evergreen management traditions, my theory should have a catchy title (check), consist of bulletable points (check), must sound absurdly easy once explained (check) and must seem obvious to everyone else when you repeat it (check). You need either an MBA degree or common sense to understand why I would write something like this. 

Ever since that beloved guardian of the morals of our institute, Cyberoam, managed to block that guy who was always sneaking out of the campus without permission - Proxifier - and bringing in all sorts of unwanted junk like blogs, youtube videos, advertisements that we have rarely been exposed to (given that the most popular television set on campus - in the canteen - has been switched off for weeks now because they don't give channels without being paid for the service), antivirus updates, recreational sites... (I mean, how immoral can you get?) I've felt the frustration among the student community grow.

The funny thing about the issue has been the reaction from the crowd. Instead of complaining to the authorities, the bulk have chosen to air their frustrations on the Google groups - where you only meet more frustrated 'end-users', not the service providers who have the best chance to provide some much-needed 'service recovery.' On the streets, in the canteen, before and after the exams, the common refrain has been, "Oh <enter favorite expletive here>, Cyberoam's blocked all the sites again. Wonder what's left for us to browse? What's the point of having internet if you can't download anything? And to think of the thousands we pay for this so-called service..."

What struck me was the odds of the complainants actually taking it to the faculty in question, instead of beating the issue to a death amongst us. How many of us actually know who holds charge now? How many of us bothered to find out?

That led me to the four 'rights' for a complainant - things you have to keep in mind if you should have any hope of getting a solution. 

• Right Tone: Taking an aggressive stance, especially from the very beginning, eliminates all chances of a conciliatory/negotiated solution - instead, it puts everyone in the role of an antagonist to everyone else. The right tone should convey the appropriate mix of genuine need, (un)due respect (without, however, the chamchagiri that politicians espouse), politeness and respect for the other side for taking time off their jobs to listen to you. If sincerity means that you would rather call the guy a duck-headed quack, be prepared to trade off that satisfaction for getting things done.
  
• Right Person: The whole effort of complaining is lost if the person I am complaining to cannot do anything about it. Just as I can't affect the CWG fiasco by talking to my roomie, or even the Director of this institute - or, to draw another parallel, just as the porter on the platform can't make Indian Railways safer - your complaint needs to reach the right ears of the right person. Timing is critical here, as is the environment in which you find the person.
  
• Right Words: You go up to your boss, tell him very politely - even respectfully - that you have a problem with one of your teammates. And then you screw it all up with, "He's refusing to fill in for me while I go on a holiday with my wife next week when the client's visiting." Enough said.
  
• Right Time: Unless you've just woken after being in a coma for the past year or so, you must be aware of the fuss over the preparations (or lack thereof) for the CWGames. Why is such a fuss being made now? Because we had less than two months (when the media furore kicked off in style), the monsoon loomed ominously and the Page 3 celebrities were not doing anything scandalous. Similarly, if you have a problem, make a noise about it when you are most likely to be heard, when the message can strike home with the full import that you think it deserves. At the same time, make sure your target is in the right mood to give you a favorable hearing.

In other words, complain in the right tone to the right person with the right words at the right time.

At the very least, you'll have the satisfaction of being efficient, if not effective.

Addendum to Genesis 1:1

And no, I have no intention of writing a book on my experiences at a premier B-school in India. In fact, I am not even going to write about my kindergarten - although I have been told I touched quite a lot of lives then.

(Pulling others' hair, tripping people, fighting, boring the kid to my left to a stupor, boring the kid to my right to a stupor, getting my teacher to learn Tamil simply because I refused to learn anything else... yup. Definitely satisfying.)

Genesis 1:1

Finally, I give in to a long-subdued impulse to (re)start blogging again. This time around, it's going to be a lot of tech/managerial stuff, instead of the literary works I am so famous for. (Hey, somebody's gotta say I am famous!) Ramsutra's gonna be ram's sutra all the way, except for a few detours here and there if the scenery warrants it.

Now what am I going to put in here that you won't find at any other source anywhere else in the world?

Simple.

Ramsutra. (Now if that doesn't sound conceited and convince you to go to another page, my positioning has worked. That's sutra #1: no one will take you seriously if you won't)

What's Ramsutra? (The first P of marketing, for the uninitiated or MBAs)

Ramsutra will consist of my take on most things that interest me - putting up a unified comm network here at IMT Nagpur, learning new technologies, the challenge of developing something you know nothing about, business tactics and strategies, reviews, behavior, actions, motivations (wow! the list is getting bigger), managerial concepts and application, teaching, learning, and a few more things that I will remember the next time I take a shower.

What's the price for an entire session of Ramsutra? (The second P - pricing)

Except for time you might wish you had spent doing something else, nothing much. Although I would definitely pitch in if you want me to absorb some of your excess financial liquidity.

Where do I find Ramsutra? (The third P being Place, I couldn't think of anything else appropriate)

Duh! Here... or at http://ramsutra.blogspot.com, which is the same address all over again.

How am I promoting my blog? (You guessed it! The fourth P - promotion)

Other than hoping that some idiosyncratic CEO takes notice of my Sutras, hires me as the successor to head his billion-dollar empire and actually retires (even after knowing how hardly I work) as planned... in which event I would hire a PR publicist to gather hits on this site. Maybe even set up a twitter account...

For the present, though, I console myself that the pearls of wisdom I leave here will find their way into the 13Ks (or any of the other alphabets that are still available at the time) of strategy/marketing/finance/operations/hr/ob/etc. that someone else will take credit for.

That about concludes it, unless you are curious about the title.

Why Ramsutra?

'Cos Ramasutra wasn't available.