A deeper look at marketing budgets will show allocation skewed heavily in favour of customer acquisition. Customer retention, like a foot note, gets only 2-3 per cent of the overall marketing spend.

A change is on the horizon with companies beginning to step up spends on customer retention to 5-8 percent using it for multiple services like analytics and social media tools.

They are engaging the BPO industry, as the belief now is that a customer's talk to a call centre provides valuable feedback on less than happy customer experience. One Indian company Airtel, recognised this almost a decade back and chose to outsource their call centre business in a 1,000 crore deal between four BPO players in 2004-05.

However, most of the other Indian CEOs have failed to tap this resource - "back office of the world" - to listen to customer chatter and improve customer retention.

The Indian BPO industry, responsible for order fulfillment, customer service, technical support, claim settlement and complaint resolution, has nearly quadrupled from 20,000 crore in 2004-05 to an estimated 85,000 crore in 2012-13, mainly on export business. The share of domestic BPO business still hovers at less than one-sixth.

Those domestic companies that have outsourced their work to BPO centres - mobile phone service providers (50 percent), banks and financial services companies (35 percent) and the rest 15 percent - admit the dramatic change in their view of the call centres after they discovered critical insights from customer chatter.

A hundred million hassled consumers join me in looking forward to the day when companies really listen to what the customer is saying and their experience turns from pain to pleasure.

(By Sanjiv Kataria for IANS)