Showing posts with label dealer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dealer. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Sold old car to a car dealer? Find out who bought it and when.

One can find out registration details of a vehicle in India at this website.

https://vahan.nic.in/nrservices/faces/search/publicSearchDetails.jsp


Keep Vehicle Registration No. and last 5 characters of the Chassis No. handy.


Although no where it is mentioned, I found out that, Vehicle Registration No is entered in two parts. First part is - say MH24AK and second part is last 4 digits, say 3934. 

In case of Chassis No notice that one is supposed to enter characters and not numbers!

What do you mean?

Although last 5 characters could be a number; practically in a Chassis No it could have special characters as well. For example, the five characters could have dash (-) or underscore (_) or a similar character in it. Point is Chassis No may not be all digits/numbers but could be a combination of digits and some special character e.g., (-2411). Look for correct Chassis No in to your Registration Certificate (RC) Book/Card carefully and then enter the value.

When you enter correct combination of Vehicle Registration No and Chassis No screen displays information as shown above. If you wish to see more details then click on the Vehicle No viz., MH32K etc. It displays complete vehicle details including Insurance Policy details, Name and address of the current owner. It even displays ownership history of the vehicle. 

The database seems quite up-to-date. It has data of vehicles as old as those registered in the year 2000 or prior.

Quite useful. But, it could be mean breach of privacy. 

Privacy?!!!

What is Privacy?

We are in India, where everything is known to everybody.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Cost of outsourced work

For last few years outsourcing work is routinely adopted by companies to reduce costs. Now a days we see various non-core activities like after sales service, salary payments, marketing activities, claim processing, event management, house-keeping, physical security of premises and so on - are routinely handled by outside agencies. While cost reduction may be true in short run - there is a cost that a company pays for outsourcing its activities.

For example, look at the quality of service provided by outsourced agencies for After Sales Service. Is there any credible proof that outsourced agencies can offer to its customers that their customer's are served well and are happy with their service? I doubt.

Take this instance of a leading software product vendor who routinely outsources its Dealer Incentive scheme management to third parties.  Yesterday we learnt about a dealer scheme from this vendor's newsletter and clicked on the link to register for the same. And we got a Google advisory saying:

Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.
Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 1 time(s) over the past 90 days.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 2 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-03-13, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-03-13.
Malicious software is hosted on 2 domain(s), including waimaighaiphahxi.in/ , weedshop.org/

I brought this to the notice of the Agency who was administering this scheme with copy to Partner Account Manager of the software vendor. In about 1 hour I got a telephone call from the Agency - a girl told me not worry - as we were pre-registered for the scheme!! When I asked her about Free Malware given out to the dealers upon registration - she feigned ignorance and said she will check up. There is no response from software vendor yet.

Few days back I had written to the same vendor's Senior Manager asking him if any quality checks are in place to ensure that all dealers are informed about the "schemes" launched by them and agency informs and distributes the incentives in time? After a reminder I got a email saying all distributors are advised to include my email id in all their communications to dealers! I asked him why have I not received the Incentive after 10 weeks of scheme closure - I've yet to receive any reply. Of course, I did not ask him about the schemes - which we did not know about - and lost out on incentives in this period of  4 to 5 months.

Take another example, recently we got cheque of more than Rs.1,00,000/- from one of customer through their outsourced agency - a bank - who makes payment to vendors on behalf of this party. Can you believe that this payment was already made to us few months back - as an advance payment after deducting TDS? When we pointed this out to the customer they asked for the cheque back by courier. Not a word of appreciation or complaint! Is this a routine? I believe so. Else how can you explain customer behaviour as noticed by us?

Believe me, this incident is not an isolated incident. We see about 1 or 2 incidents every year like this and return the cheques.

Covid Resource for Second Wave

Initial part of this blog has resources useful for all of India. Later part is dedicated to resources for Mumbai city.