I have had a reseller account with Site5 (www.site5.com) since the last 14 months. One of the things that could be better is their human response time for a trouble ticket.

Site5 guarantees a response (not a resolution of the problem, which is fine) to any trouble ticket within 24 hours. They claim that their average response time is about 25 minutes. In reality, a human response to a trouble ticket (as opposed to their autoresponder acknowledgment) takes more than 12 hours almost every time I have raised one.

If you force your potential customers to divulge unnecessary personal details, you run the risk of alienating them and probably losing them even if they have been your customer before.

The motorcycle we use is nearly 20 years old, so we were looking around for a new one. It makes a lot of sense to purchase it on loan, so I looked around for banks that offer two-wheeler loans. As I had already availed of a car loan with HDFC (www.hdfcbank.com) and felt quite satisfied with their service, I went to their web site. Sure enough, the biggest promo on the home page was for two-wheeler loans.

Customer service seems farthest from the minds of the bigwigs at Kodak India. My experience with it over the last two days has convinced me never to go near a Kodak camera product in any hurry.

It started with a request from my relative in Mangalore who had purchased a Kodak LS743 in Dubai last year and wanted help in locating a service centre to troubleshoot a serious problem- the lens woudln't retract.

As I spent one hour at IOB's Mahalingapuram branch in Chennai for a 'Anywhere Banking' money transfer transaction that normally takes just 5 minutes, I pondered about the following:

• Customer Servicing: This seems an individual rather than an organisational concept in India. One guy working at the bank had the gall to tell me that he had more important work (his very words!) than attending to my transaction. He said the bank's system might hang if he tried to find out if the money transfer went through, so he would do it at 2.00 p.m in the afternoon.

  I barely controlled my anger, said it was important to know if the transfer went through as my car loan account in Delhi was due for payment today. I also demanded to know what would happen if the transfer didn't happen. He said it would go 'as usual', meaning the next working day. Brilliant, don't you think?