Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

 Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Jaago Grahak, Jaago " Pick up any book on startups, and you'll always find customer-centricity as a core tenet for a company. " Give the customer what they want, and the rest shall follow " advise the pundits. While evolving from resource crunched scrappy startups to competition-trampling behemoths, companies often develop a  flippant attitude towards their customers. If you are lucky, you will even experience it blossoming into effrontery. In this post, I want to share my excruciating experience with Samsung, and how a consumer can fight back Goliath. Wardrobe Dry A year ago, we decided to upgrade our washing machine. Our IFB machine had been serving us well, but we still need to put our clothes out for drying. Rather than opting for an additional dryer, we thought of going for an all-in-one washer-dryer machine. These machines have modes called Wardrobe Dry , and as the name suggests, spit out clothes so dry that you can directly ...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted: " Only the paranoid survive " 'In these unprecedented times' may sound like a cliche, but it appears to be true in the context of this pandemic. Every single day, we are bombarded with statistical data quoting the number of deaths and active cases, infographics that discuss the spread of the disease, posts shared by people lamenting the deaths of their loved ones and how the healthcare and associated services are overwhelmed by the sheer scale of afflicted people, in addition to multiple forwards that discuss cures - some useful while others balderdash. Considering that a large number of my near and dear ones came in contact with the disease, I thought of putting together a note that may benefit others. It is important to continuously educate ourselves and make sure that we are protecting ourselves and those around us. As the old adage goes, ' Prevention is better than cure '. Intellectually, we understand this; and though a few pe...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ Working from a customer backward makes businesses successful ” Customer service is one of the most important pillars in an organisation and can play a significant role in the success or failure of a company. Amazon, one of the largest multi national companies in the world, has put customer delight into their core by making it their goal to be Earth's most customer-centric company. To achieve that, Amazon has 14 leadership principles that form the company's core tenets and is taken very seriously when it comes to hiring. Customer obsession is their first. I'll give you an example to illustrate this point. When running my own startup, a one-man show, I used Amazon's AWS as my cloud provider. Apart from the fact that Amazon AWS was (and still is) the market leader in cloud infrastructure, it was the only service that I'd used. I'd experimented a little with Google cloud, but it hadn't quite reached the stage that I needed. One...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Reduce, reuse... I am not so sure about recycling phone numbers " In the good ol' days, people used to create accounts on various platforms using email addresses. But as smart phones started becoming ubiquitous and as 'Mobile First' approaches became the norm with a million apps cropping up every other day, a paradigm shift happened in the sign up process - Mobile numbers were introduced for registering new accounts. Mobile numbers had a few advantages over email addresses - Creating an email addresses is cheap, and people can quickly create multiple email addresses without much hassle. However, people most likely have only one number, and occasionally, some have two. People are less likely to abuse systems like First time user discount  using mobile phones because it is not possible, unlike emails. Verification using OTP is a lot faster than signing up using emails. And so, signing up using mobile phones started becoming the...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: "MakeMyTrip  Customer Service Sucks! Period " About ten days ago, I wanted to book a couple of rooms for my parents for a visit to Mangalore. As a regular user of online services like MakeMyTrip  Cleartrip and Go Ibibo, I decided to open three tabs in my browser and check prices across all three portals (Something that we all do). I was, obviously, signed in as I wanted to redeem my wallet points. After seeing that MakeMyTrip was the cheapest, I decided to go ahead with it. I saw that the cost of the room in MakeMyTrip in the booking page was Rs 3162. The screenshot shows the price breakdown. As per this, the room originally costs Rs 4366. They then added their own charges, applied some coupon automatically and also reduced my wallet money. The final bill, inclusive of taxes, came up to Rs 3162. I was happy as any regular customer would be when they see the original price struck off and a new price shown next to it. ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " It is amazing that a tiny seed can grow into an enormous tree " India lives in its villages - We have heard this many times. And while steps are being taken to ' Make in India ', India is not considered to be a manufacturing hub yet - especially when compared to her giant neighbour, China. Manufacturing is a challenge, and for that matter, entrepreneurship is a challenge. While there are many challenges in starting and building your own enterprise, from hiring and retaining good people, purchasing raw materials and paying for other overheads, the challenges generally have one common denominator - Money. You need money to hire people, money to purchase raw materials, money to pay bills etc. And getting money is the biggest challenge. Once you have a certain amount of money, that money can be put in to generate more money through the business - use a bit of it for operations, a bit of it for purchasing more equipment or hiring more p...

Swami Gulagulaananda said : " Battles won are inconsequential when the war is lost " " Indians don't have any civic sense. Look at the way people drive! Look at all the garbage being strewn around. Tchah! That's why everyone moves to America and Europe. Things are so much cleaner there and people are so much better too. Not unlike here... " is a complaint that is often heard during moments of frustration - especially when that pesky autorickshaw driver cuts you off or comes in the wrong way in a one way road. I had often wondered if these claims are true or not. On a trip to the US, I decided to make comparisons and make some mental notes. My first stop had been the West Coast of the US - San Francisco and the Bay Area predominantly. I found that people drive in a very disciplined manner - There's lane discipline, people don't cut other people off, traffic signals are followed religiously and the distance between two vehicles is enough to fit ...

Swami Gulagulaananda paraphrased Jacob Braude: " The duck seems calm and unruffled at the outset, but paddles like crazy under water " In the good ol' days when I was trying to learn HTML, there were a set of editors called WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get, where you could visually design web pages as you would write a Word document without writing a single line of code, and the final page would look as it did in the editor. However, a majority of the times, life is not WYSIWYG (pronounced wee-see-wig ). It is the opposite of that - thus WYSINWYG. Several years ago, before Facebook (and perhaps before Orkut) became a rage, I had a chance encounter with a website called Greenpeace. I was very young and I didn't know anything about them. The page I was looking at was campaigning for turtles against an industrial conglomerate. I immediately decided to join the fight - My reasoning at that time was simple: I love animals, I know turtles are getting extinct, ...