Hopefully, he was not making such atrocious statements on his own behalf. He was speaking on behalf of the management, who include the managing director and the operations director. The entire nation witnessed with disbelief the bragging AI official loudly defending the incident with no trace of concern or emotion in his voice for the nerve-shattering experience of the passengers.

It was another matter that the Director General of Civil Aviation thought it otherwise and derostered both the pilots and the aircraft maintenance engineer, supervising the flight's departure on the day, within 24 hours, pending an investigation into the incident. The people would have been more pleased if the government, the AI owner, had also suspended the suspension of the company's poker-faced spokesperson along with its managing director and operations director, pending the inquiry. Such an action would have sent a clear message to the public that the government shares the concern of the airline passengers and their kin, and expects the airline management to express similar concern and compassion while communicating with customers and the public on an unfortunate occasion as this.

Close on the heels of the AI incident, the management of the country's No. 1 airline, Jet Airways, had thousands of its passengers stranded in various airports without refunds or rearrangement of bookings on flights of other airlines due to a well-anticipated pilots' strike that paralysed Jet Airways' services. The reason behind the pilots' strike was that the Jet management refused to recognize the fundamental right of its pilots to form a union and, on top of it, sacked two of its pilots for making such an attempt. Airlines management all over the world treat non-executive pilots as workers and, as such, the latter are always represented by their unions for collective bargains. Jet seems to live in the mediaeval age and wants to run a union-free operation even at the cost of the sufferings and 'detention' of thousands of passengers.

In both the AI and Jet cases, the so-called management theories on customer care and the consumer response system (CRS) in a disaster zone were totally ignored. A rational management would have probably been more careful in its dealings with customers on such occasions and, more so, when both the airlines are passing through troubled times with falling foreign-bound as well as domestic passenger traffic. Unfortunately, business corporations and their managers are taught to take firm stands and tough postures while dealing with their customers or consumers as also with employees in crisis situations more for legal reasons and fear for compensation payment, in many cases, and other financial implications than for true merits of such cases.

Not long ago, an executive director of ITC Limited, had to write to the vice-chairman of East India Hotels Limited, owner of the Oberoi group of hotels, after the former failed to get a response from the general manager of an Oberoi hotel to his repeated letters and phone calls to him. The ITC director, attending the weekly luncheon meeting of a Rotary Club at the Oberoi hotel, tripped on a wet toilet floor and broke his right forearm. He wanted to bring this to the notice of the Hotel GM to ensure that it does not happen to other guests in the hotel. It was only after an intervention by the vice-chairman, who happened to be an ex-ITC executive himself, that the Oberoi GM spoke to the ITC director to apologize. It is possible that East India Hotels' legal department advised the GM against making any direct communication with the hotel's injured high-profile corporate guest fearing that it could lead to the latter's seeking a huge damage claim. In an irony of fate, though, that Oberoi hotel GM now heads a prestigious ITC hotel property.

Most business corporations are ruthlessly formal in dealing with consumer or customer complaints and grievances against the product quality or services. Only a few weeks ago, Air France got wide media coverage for their inhuman treatment of a large group of west-bound Indian passengers who missed the connecting flight in Paris. Consumer complaints are invariably replied in legal language that is principally defensive of the concerned business enterprise and the purpose of which is to insulate the corporation against any compensation or damage claim from an offended customer. Call centres and the so-called toll-free customer query services are used to further protect those business corporations from any direct exposure to aggrieved consumers. Dial 'X' for exasperation. The system will tire you out. The pleasant initial 'may-I-help-you' welcome from a male or female voice from a company's call centre may soon turn out to be a well-rehearsed hoax.

The experience could be so frustrating that you might feel that you are talking to some well-trained parrots at the other end who are incapable of even understanding your concern, leave alone offering you any real help to resolve the issue. Disgusted, you would ultimately curse your luck and hang up. And, that is exactly one of the main reasons why companies' so-called customer care divisions spend so much money to take shelters at hired call centres to address your post-purchase agonies for defective products, shabby services and getting cheated. Not all consumers surrender to the system. A few fight their cases out in multi-layered consumer courts in time-consuming deliberations. Several lakhs of such cases are today pending with consumer courts across the country. Companies hardly pay any serious attention to these cases. The results, which often go in favour of consumers, rarely impact a corporate operational style and help mend its ways.

The disease of dumping sub-standard goods and services on consumers, more often under the guise of 'special offers' or discount sale, by companies is fast spreading across the country as the competition hots up in the liberalized market place. Even the regional or multiple-service-centre concept is being replaced by a single service outlet. Dell Corporation of the US, the world's second largest seller of laptop computers after Hewlit Packard (HP), has no service centre in the whole of eastern India and several other parts of the country having huge sales. Its national service centre is based in Bangalore. Customers are forced to register their complaints with the Dell Bangalore outfit using hard-to-connect toll-free number or by making STD calls. The same is the case of Blackberry, the high cost mobile phone manufacturer.

Increasing number of corporations - public sector or private sector, multinational or domestic, large or medium-sized - treat their ordinary consumers with contempt by shutting out the direct communication channels between a customer and the legal maker-distributor or the service provider once a sale deal is completed. Even the sales outlets and agents wash their hands off the buyers' complaints. E-mail response is often irregular and pathetic. Unfortunately, the Union Consumer Affairs Ministry seems to be neither deeply interested nor adequately equipped to discipline such mischievous and arrogant corporations with poor CRS record. Ends(IPA Service)