More ire vented!

This blog post will take you through the 3 worst service providers in India. From simply bad value for your money to service providers who are better classified as purse-snatchers, this post has it all. Read on!

#3: Bad Value for Money – Airtel: I have used mobile service providers across 4-5 major cities in India. For most cases my preference has been Hutch (now Vodafone) and not Airtel. Only recently have I decided to take an Airtel postpaid connection. The difference was clear from Day 1. Little things make a customer feel happy. With Hutch, on subscription I received a set of discount coupons at restaurants, retail stores etc; with Airtel, nothing. Things began their downward slide from there on. The call centre for Airtel had an amazing feature by which you could never get to speak to an officer, but rather be looped back to the ‘welcome to Airtel’ menu after a series of long and painful entries. Call drop rates are close to 100%, which means almost all STD calls I make get unceremoniously dropped after some time. First time connection is a near impossibility. It is either a ‘Network Busy’ message or a call that is only one-way. There are a host of other issues as well.

Airtel may be focused more on advertising than on service right now. Justifiably so, the phenomenal market growth demands that Airtel have top of the mind recall. It is only when growth tapers out when Airtel perhaps will turn their attention to its existing customer base.

#2: Not worth their weight in toilet paper – ICICI Lombard: I am basing this on a series of calls I had with the ICICI Lombard call centre. Before leaving for an overseas trip I had availed of the ‘services’ of an ICICI Bank Travel card. There was an extremely steep joining charge of $150. For this they provided travel insurance from ICICI-Lombard against loss or delay of baggage (This was mentioned in the brochure that came along with the card). Unfortunately, that is exactly what had happened. I decided to call up ICICI bank and they routed me to ICICI-Lombard insurance desk (and rightly so). The ICICI-Lombard insurance help desk had no clue that insurance was being offered with the travel card. I read out the brochure to them. Talk of on-the-job-training. This is the latest, have the customers train the employees. They cheerfully agreed to forward the call to the relevant department. And lo and behold I was talking to ICICI Bank. Few more agonizing calls later I got the ICICI-Lombard people to agree that travel insurance was their domain. They agreed rather reluctantly to send me a claim form. My friend with the exact same problem called up after hearing that sense had prevailed with ICICI-Lombard. But his joy was only too short-lived. He was asked to visit the Lombard office in Mumbai. Yeah that is the whole point of having call centers! Other friends who called in with the same problem after this got other responses like ‘We don’t have travel insurance!’ or ‘We cannot process this, this is to be done by ICICI bank!’ I shudder to think of them selling life or medical insurance.

#1: Purse-Snatchers – Reliance Communications: This is the pits! You have officially entered the sulfur pits of hell! Trouble started from the moment I signed on the dotted line for a Reliance NetConnect data card. The connection was given in someone else’s name. Now that was a first! Therefore I never got the bills in the first place. Then one fine day without warning I was barred from using their 1-kbps internet connection. I made the payment through their website and was told that they would be able to restore the connection after the payment reflected on their website. And that would take an amazingly mind-numbing 48 hours to show. And you thought online payments were faster than 1980’s money orders? Think again. Since I could not do anything, I roughed the 48 hours out. But the money order got lost in cyberspace. I had to wait for 5 days before Reliance finally restored my connection. I gave up trying to convince the call centre that I had made the payment. The website still does not reflect the payment made after 2 months. Neither does it have any information on bills. I would definitely like to meet the fishmonger who manages the website.

I am usually a patient person; I vent my displeasure out through blog-posts. Now you can’t get milder than that. But just the other day I waited for 25 minutes then disconnected the call to the help line because I was still on hold. I wanted to call up and find out why I was experiencing lower than the usual 1-kbps speeds. The speeds were in the range of 5 bytes per second. Another first! I could visualize a hapless employee on the reliance internet gateway furiously typing 0s and 1s into his terminal after the physical link went down.

This is the story of the so called service providers in India. I am sure many of the few readers of this blog would also have similar ghost stories to share! See you on the next brand bashing party!