adiga’s – Pertinent Observations

On multitasking, queues and call centres

Queues and call centres, with linear processing, are inefficient as they result in low utilisation.

I recently read this excellent article by Tim Harford about multitasking. In this, he talks about research which says that multitasking makes you ineffective because of high cost of context switching, something that I’ve come to learn over the last three years. He also has this nice piece on ADHD here:

“You’re letting more information into your cognitive workspace, and that information can be consciously or unconsciously combined,” says Carson. Two other psychologists, Holly White and Priti Shah, found a similar pattern for people suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

It would be wrong to romanticise potentially disabling conditions such as ADHD. All these studies were conducted on university students, people who had already demonstrated an ability to function well. But their conditions weren’t necessarily trivial — to participate in the White/Shah experiment, students had to have a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, meaning that their condition was troubling enough to prompt them to seek professional help.

This piece, however, is not about multitasking at the personal level. It is not about ADHD, either. It is about Adigas, and Citibank, and call centres.

As I had mentioned in a blog post yesterday, I visited Vasudev Adigas in Jayanagar 8th block on Sunday, after a really long gap. They have completely revamped and redesigned the restaurant, changing the place of the cash counter, food counters, kitchens and what not. Most of the design is good, and speeds up processes. Except for the cash counter.

A “feature” of cash counters at South Indian fast food restaurants is that there is no queueing. Counters are placed in a way that people can crowd around it from all directions. While this leads to some confusion and encourages bad behaviour, it also ensures that the person at the cash counter is always productive. If one customer is dillydallying about her order, the cashier can simply process another order before the first customer has made up her mind.

The new cash counter here, however, have very restricted access which makes it hard for the guy at the counter to multitask. As a consequence, his utilisation is low (customer take time to make up their minds), and the average wait is longer. And there is no queueing either, so there is no reduction in bad behaviour also.

For a similar reason, call centres are ineffective – they result in low utilisation on the part of both the customer and the call centre “executive”. It is unlikely that you spend all your time talking, and there is significant amount of time wasted in being put on hold or listening to boilerplate messages.

For example, I need to talk to Citibank because they’ve issued me a new debit card but haven’t sent me a PIN. When I call them, I’ll have to enter my account number multiple times, waste time listening to their options read out in a linear fashion and simply wait listening to random music when they inevitably put me on hold. On the “executive”‘s side, there will be time taken to verify stuff – when they are stuck with me while they might be serving another customer instead.

Call centres are a vestige of the 1990s (or earlier outside India), when phones were plentiful and internet not so. A significantly superior mechanism is to replace the call centre with chat – either through a web interface or through an app. Chat allows both the customer and the executive to multitask, and not waste time in meaningless tasks. Authentication can be superior to that on the phone, no time is lost navigating (since nothing needs to be read out linearly), and utilisation of both the customer and the executive is really high.

Yet, Citibank doesn’t offer this option. Neither do a lot of other supposedly progressive organisations. And that is disrespect to the time of both their customers and their “executives”. Hopefully, they’ll offer a chat option soon.

As for Adigas, the redesign has been after their new PE money came in. I’m less bullish about their changing their billing counter design.

Coffee, sugar and cream

A couple of weeks back, my wife and I had a long discussion on the operations of the coffee counter at Maiya’s in Jayanagar. It was an interesting discussion since while I was extremely familiar with the operations there (having gone there almost every other day for the last year), the wife was seeing them for the first time.

My hypothesis was that it was the structure of the coffee+tiffin combo and not accounting for multiple orders in one ticket that caused the congestion. The wife’s diagnosis was rather different – she recognised the sugar counter as the bottleneck.

Most South Indian restaurants have ready two kinds of boiling milk – one with sugar and one without, and your choice of milk (or a linear combination) can be added to decoction to make coffee of the required sweetness for you. Maiya’s does it differently. They only have unsweetened milk, and you need to add the sugar yourself.

So there is sugar placed in a bowl beyond the coffee counter where you add the sugar, get yourself a spoon (inconveniently placed before the coffee counter which means you stretch across) and go on while stirring the coffee. For non-regular customers (my untested hypothesis is that most Maiya’s customers are regulars), this is a novelty and leads to inefficiency of the full queue.

The wife argued that if Maiya’s were to keep both sweetened and unsweetened milk (like other restaurants), sugar could come pre-mixed in the coffee and the bottleneck could be eliminated. Since the barista doesn’t multitask (he fills exactly one cup at a time), there is no problem in miscommunication, etc.

The problem is that turnover of the unsweetened milk in other establishments is not high enough to maintain quality. The thing with the milk is that it needs to be constantly stirred, or at least poured from, for cream to not form in it (such cream can make the coffee gross). When the demand for a particular kind of milk (usually unsweetened) is low, it is not stirred enough, and cream forms. And then when you ask for coffee without sugar (or “less sugar” – remember linear combinations of the milks are possible) you end up with cream in your coffee.

This happened to me twice in the last three days. On Saturday I was having coffee at Hatti (opposite Maiya’s), asked for “strong, less sugar”, which meant I got some of the unsweetened milk, which means there was cream in my coffee. I had to spit out some to make it palatable. And the story repeated itself at the Vasudev Adigas in Jayanagar 8th Block on Sunday. Nice tasting coffee made gross by the cream.

It is to solve this problem that Maiya’s perhaps has only one kind of milk – it is constantly boiling away and being poured from, and there is no cream. And you get superior quality coffee. For which I’m willing to pay a premium.

Bangalore Trip

So I went to Bangalore on Thursday. And returned yesterday afternoon. It was a fairly eventful trip – just that most of the events that took place during the trip were planned. There weren’t too many surprises – either positive or negative, and this lack of volatility meant that it was a good trip overall.

I had ended my last post hoping that my bike would start. And start it did, dutifully. Unfortunately, it was to tell Jai later during the day, when it abruptly stopped somewhere in Gandhibazaar market. It was quite hot and I had to push it around a fair distance to find a garage that was open in order to get it repaired.

The thing with automobile repair shops is that most of them are owned by Muslims, and thus have their weekly holiday on Friday. While it might be convenient in normal times since you can leave your bike for service on a Sunday, it can be death when your bike breaks down on Friday afternoon. I had to go past two or three closed auto repair shops that day before I found a “Sowmya bike point” where my spark plug got replaced.

Two of my three breakfasts were consumed at Darshinis. Actually, on Friday, I had my breakfast in three installments. Saturday was the usual Masala Dosa at the Adigas in Jayanagar 4th block. Dinner on Saturday was at Shiok, the first time I was visiting it at the new location. The food, as usual, was excellent. One extremely under-rated starter at Shiok is Choo Chee Potatoes. I strongly recommend you to try it out the next time. I left the choice of my drink to Madhu Menon, and he recommended some pink stuff for me.

I met Baada, Harithekid and PGK at Shiok. I was meeting PGK for the first time. I was already a bit disoriented when I had arrived at Shiok (my head had gone blank a couple of times earlier that day, leading me to take an auto to Shiok rather than putting bike), and combine that with the pink drink and I think I’ve forgotten what PGK looks like. All I remember is that he too had a pink drink – which was different from mine.

I managed to submit address change requests at most of the places I had intended to. I went to SBI and Karnataka Bank, and extended my fixed deposits – taking advantage of the insanely high prevailing rates. I visited one aunt for dinner on Friday, and another for lunch on Saturday.

The only time during the entire trip that I was consumed by NED was when I went to inspect my house in Bangalore. It was after a gap of almost ten years that I was seeing the house empty. It was at that moment I think – three months after I moved to Gurgaon – that it hit me that I don’t live in Bangalore any more. And that I don’t intend to return for a while. It took a maddening auto drive to Shiok to cure me of this bout of NED.

Friday evening was spent in the cantonment area, though I regret to inform you that I visited neither of MG Road and Brigade road. I met Udupa and Woreshtmax Vishnu for tea at Koshy’s, and on either side of tea, raided the Premier Bookshop. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pics as I had planned. The only picture of Premier that I now have is the one taken with Neha Jain’s wrist that appeared in the ToI on 26th July 2004 (I don’t have a scanned copy; a few hard copies of the clipping are there somewhere in my house in Jayanagar in Bangalore).

I spent all my coupons, and Shamanth’s coupons also. I still have Lakshana’s coupon with me, and I intend to mail it to her. Here is what I bought:

The Human Zoo – Desmond Morris
The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
An artist and a mathematician (a book about the fictional mathematician Nicholas Bourbaki; forgot the author)
India: A History – John Keay
Longitude
The Stuff of Thought – Steven Pinker

Once again, thanks to all those who recommended books to me. Unfortunately, a large number of those were not available at Premier. i’ll probably order them from Rediff Books once I’ve whittled down my have-and-unread list.