(Photo courtesy: Matt Reinbold)

It’s not easy for applicants to talk to Indian b-schools to ask for admissions-related information, something we discovered during a little experiment we did this month.

Between July 4 and July 15, 2013, we posed as applicants and asked simple admissions-related queries to top 20 Indian b-schools (as per the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings 2013) via the enquiry email addresses, phone numbers listed on their websites and through their Facebook pages. We made three attempts per school in all during working hours and days. Few responded.

Schools from New Delhi and around were the hardest to get through to over the phone. The board numbers of Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), Delhi and Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Mumbai did not answer the phone at all. Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon and Department of Management Studies (DMS), IIT, Delhi answered our call only on the third attempt, and for the question ‘Can you please share details about scholarship options available to candidates applying to the flagship program at the institute?’, directed us to alternate numbers which also were not answered. In addition, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai and SP Jain Institute of Management Studies and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai tersely asked us first to get an admission and only then talk about our query.

When PaGaLGuY later asked the schools’ spokespersons for reasons for the unanswered phone calls, a faculty member from FMS said, “Due to a flood of calls for our new undergraduate course, our staff has been unable to take all calls.” A student representative from IIFT said, “There is a technical problem with our boardline numbers.” JBIMS did not respond to our query.

The responses to our posing-as-applicant emails were even worse. To that same question on scholarships, IIM-C, XLRI Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, National institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai, TISS, Mumbai, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Pune and DMS, IIT Delhi just did not bother to reply. Others gave us one line responses. However, the reply from IIM Lucknow took the cake. “Pls. contact IIM-I as it is the present CAT Centre,” it said. Baffled as to why IIM-I would answer questions about IIM-L’s scholarships, our team was even more amused when there was no response from IIM-I on all three attempts as well.

Results for a similar experiment with the schools’ official Facebook pages were no different. As many as eleven schools ignored our scholarship query, including the top ranked IIMs at Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

Perhaps it is the competitive struggle for a seat at top Indian b-schools, that they don’t feel a need to answer applicant queries. How ironic, that schools which aim to define the standards around good client or customer service practices among managers are in fact the worst at it. The schools’ digital communication instruments rest as mere antique decoration pieces on their websites.

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