“Did Kishore yell at you?”
Recently, we lost a customer database. Yes, we lost it – multiple servers crashed, backups were corrupted and so on: net effect, one particular customer lost all their data. But that’s not the point of this story, because we recovered all their data, bringing them back to Production in 24 hours. The point of this story is about perspectives – how people behave in a given situation and what we can learn from that. After all, a good CRM is all about reflecting human behaviour!
So anyway, like I said, we lost the database late one night, after the customer’s users (a call center that truly tests our cluster performance) had knocked off for the day. Our engineers identified the issue right away, worked through the night and got things ship-shape. Along the way, our Engineering Manager was talking to a number of people who were affected by the outage – and some who were not. The first person we called early in the morning was the manager who runs the call center. You know what his reaction was? He said (in Tamil): “OK, so you think you’ll get all my data back. But how are you going to deal with your other customers?” Luckily for us, it was only his mega-tenant database that was affected, but the way he asked that question, it very obvious that he was truly concerned – for us. He was worried that we would be under the gun with lots of other people. And he was expressing his solidarity with us in the most direct way possible. That really got me thinking: after all, at the end of the day, we are vendors to him. His feeling worried about our future is a reflection of his trust of us as a vendor, so that’s heartening. But his feeling for us as individuals is much more important: it is a reflection of his bigness of heart. And that’s not just heartening, it is inspiring.
Another call that Partha (our Engg Mgr) made was to a relative – a relative whom I have never met, but to whom Partha has spoken about me in passing. His reaction was very different – and as interesting. He asked: “Did Kishore yell at you?” To him, coming from the more traditional work-environments that he has seen, the reaction of the “boss” was critical. Partha’s response to that question is as inspiring as our customer’s – he said “No, but that’s not the point; we should be worried about the customer, not about Kishore.” Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m sure I can be nearly as nasty as Hari Sadu if I try. And I’m sure Partha knows that. But his response showed true professional maturity: when such a crisis occurs, one must worry more about how the customer is affected than about how one’s own boss will react. Partha’s belief is that focusing on the customer is better for his career than focusing on his boss. And it’s better for his boss’ career, too!
Net effect, a lot of learning, not the least about the technology we work with. But that’s what’s fun about our SaaS CRM business: we learn interesting things even in the adversity of a server crash!
