The recent airline fracas reflects one thing for sure, which is that customers do not really matter. While there are explanations as to why the airlines are as helpless as the passengers, it is unfortunate that it had to take the unpardonable behaviour of one passenger to actually get the ministry to address an issue that should have already had a standard operating process (SOP) in place for a seasonal contingency.

If one looks at the travails of customers in almost all segments, one can sense this feeling of apathy. Let us look at banking. There is a regulation that asks banks to do a periodic KYC of all deposit-holders. There is evidently a rationale for the same — to ensure that the customers are still banking with the bank as there has been a piling up of unclaimed deposits. But banks insist that customers should fill in forms with photos attached and submit self-attested Aadhar and PAN cards. Now this is odd since these two documents never change unless one has consciously changed the address. This involves customers going to the branches to do the KYC which is inconvenient especially when nothing has changed. In fact, when the address changes, it pays the customer to notify the same to the bank as it is in her interest. A simpler way would be to take a default no-change in KYC as being given with customers being told to provide documents in case things have changed. For online........

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