Day 9

Miscommunication Rules!

Deepika told me yesterday not to report to Bandra today as i'll be doing the night shift later. She told me that she'll faxed me the details for today by 10am. At 10am, I checked with the front desk and there was no fax. I did my journals while waiting. Still no fax at 1pm, and i decided to go for lunch. I returned and there were 2 messages. Deepika was trying to reach me urgently. She told me that i have to report to Bandra by 1530hrs as the customers would be there. I'll be meeting Vincent there.

"Vincent? Who's Vincent?"

"Didn't you get the fax?"

"No, i did not. "

Later, it was found out that she did fax me but to the wrong number!

I reached Bandra at 1530hrs. Vincent was already with the customers. I spent my time waiting for him as I did not want to be rude by just barging into the conference room. I was so anxious about meeting Vincent that I forgot to ask Deepika for details of the call centre. Deepika, being busy as she always is, also forget to give me the details. This later resulted in another miscommunication!

When Vincent finished meeting the customers, he met up with me and told me he had another customer in Parel to meet up with and invited me to tag along. It sounded really exciting. As he was in a hurry, we quickly left Bandra.

Parel - South Mumbai (City Area)


Traffic was not as bad as in the suburbs. Vincent told me that Parel is in South Mumbai. Vincent gave me an overview of his job in the taxi. He told me that the customer is in the pharmaceutical line.

Finding the customer’s place was really difficult. That’s a thing I learnt about this place. The address is there but the place is always seems to be non-existent. We were told it was next to Zeba Showroom (carpet shop). We looked high and low and finally found a door that leaded us to a narrow passageway to a small office. We had to climb a flight of steep stairs that leaded us to a small, low-ceiling office! So weird. Crampy office for a rich businessman!!!

Kilitch Drugs is the customer. Mr Mehta is the boss running this company. The discussion was about a loan for the customer to ramp up its business of producing a specific line of tablet for the Indian market. While Vincent was engaging in the discussion, I just spent my time observing how Vincent handled the customers. I realized that the questions were focused on customer’s business history, future prospects, trade rivals, etc. Mr Mehta was very cooperative. He gave a history of his company and told Vincent that he was not keen with the loan as he has other banks to back him up. Was that a ploy to have Citibank engaged in doing business with the company? Hmmm….

The taxi driver sent Vincent back to his office in Parel. He told me that the taxi would bring me back to the hotel after that.