Monday, May 14, 2012

Annoying Airtel (Well Nothing new)

Nothing pisses me off like a bad customer service!

I pay money to your service and expect value for each and every paisa that i pay.

I am one among the many who use a touch screen mobile. Yeah that also happens to be the so called smart phone.Hence I also data services.

Along other spam messages i receive[Yeah i have subscribed to DND] there comes a message on 12 Apr-20.48
I have subscribed for GAMES MANIA_5
The reaction of yours truly was WTF! I dont play any games and have never played any games except for the occasional minesweeper and the legendary angry birds. [Yeah i am one of a rare specimen]

I call the customer care,blast at them. They take the request for deactivation[Ref #: F1037597005]
I raise the same same issue in twitter to @airtel_presence. I get a canned response share your contact details we will call back.
I get a call when i was in middle of something so asked him to call back later. Later,I get a call from broadband when the issue is with my mobile and one month goes away and i never get any call from any folks.

When i open my bill to pay, I see am being charged 5 per day from 12-Apr.
I call the customer care, unable to resolve, the agent volunteers to escalate to that the supervisor and i get the below response

1)The service was deactivated
2)But,The service was reactivated [Oh yeah of course by yours truly as he doesn't know how to use a smart phone and more importantly how to finger i mean use his finger]
3)Hence the bill.

He doesn't know how it got activated, he cannot assure that the activation will not happen again.
He doesn't know why i never got a notification, when i reactivated it.

I come back tweet to @airtel_presence praise(sic) them they are the best customer service and after asking them is it because of the lack of the SIM or the lack of network coverage that they are still not able to get back to me even after a month.

Now a person calls from Airtel takes a look at everything, when i ask him, why I am i billed day in day out even after the deactivation, he accepts, though the agent has made a note it has been deactivated, he never deactivated!

Now here are the questions:
1) Why does it gets activated when i havent activated? Why does it just notifies me with out getting a confirmation? How do you even let such a system exist in the first place?
2) If Airtel is just the content provider, why does it allow the vendor[GAMES MANIA] to behave in such a manner? Is the revenue cut from GAMES MANIA much important than a Customer?
3) Why is that in the customer service, no one monitors or tracks things properly?
4) Doesn't Airtel conducts audits or process checks with the customer service vendor now and then?
5) When the Airtel guy can answer me effectively and if a customer service vendor cannot handle me, why to have a third party service vendor?
6) When i will be fined 100/- for a late payment even by a minute, why should i pay my bill promptly and wait for a month to get a refund?  More importantly who will compensate for the time i spend with the customer care for such a long time and more importantly your time by making you read all these!
7) I did ask them, I need the mail id of Vice President for the Customer Service, he said it is confidential. Those folks have my phone number mail id and address and you are a publicly traded company and he cannot reveal the mail id of Vice President of Customer care!

The issues doesnt ends over there. I think they are first (hopefully the only one) to charge the customer for talking to the customer care!

When you pay the bills, online, Whenever i copy paste the number at number field it never accepts it as valid number
It asks for the mail id if it is mobile bill and sends the receipt but it doesnt asks for the mail id when i want to pay my broadband bill
God knows why such discrepancies.

No I am not alone, Please check the https://twitter.com/#!/Airtel_Presence to see how many complaints they receive in an hour?

Now,if only their process/service/systems were proper, what is the need for a customer service? Well if you buy a product and if the product is too good and you dont face too many problems will you worry much about the after sales support or service? Similarly if only Airtel had good systems or process in place, the chance for the customer to complain comes down, so out of that the complaint of bad customer service too obviously comes down. Just dont focus or worry about proper balances and checks ensure there is no need for balance and checks

I really wonder how they design their systems or the senior management folks do or manage the outsourcing but we get to see articles like these.
http://blogs.hbr.org/govindarajan/2012/05/telecoms-competitive-solution-outsourcing.html

Nope I am not against the outsourcing. All i am saying is manage the outsourcing properly.
May be the right question to ask rather than all of this "Why I am i still their customer?"

Sincerely,
Concerned Stockholder

p.s
If Airtel had been in US would it have been possible for me to get all the dissatisfied customers and file a class action suit against them and made lakhs #justasking

2 comments:

Ramesh said...

Yes, I will ask, why are you still their customer

The probable answer is that every other provider is maybe as bad.

Another possible answer is that the pain of switching is maybe valued at more than Rs 5 per day - after all you'll receive the full attention of Ramamritham

Better to grin and bear it and write blog posts like this :)

Venkat said...

ipa ungakita vanthu neratiya company lossla poguthu, erkanave annouce panna offer ellam invalid, palayapadi call cahrge ellam 2rs, 3rs per minutenu sonna kudupingala???... vera sim madhituveenga, (you means just example not auctually meaning you), namma makkals neradiya ethayum eathukra palakam illama offer mela mogam vaikrathoda vilaivuthan ithu ellam.. no company is there to do social service at their cost.. fundamental of businees is profit, in our nation telecom industry competition become too worst and no way any good service provider can be genuine and attract coustomers..