I am fully aware that by writing this post, I may not only be making the readers aware about the experiences that I have gone through but the generalizations I am going to make may hurt the image of India as the Customer Service back office for the globe.
The sector that I am talking to about is the much touted and highly successful mobile telephony in India, where customer service is all about unfulfilled promises.
The first sore experience is with Vodafone, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh (earlier Hutch) and then now with Airtel Delhi.
In the case of Vodafone, the service failure started in Delhi but even the AP circle didn't handle it well. At the end I had to terminate the connection without paying the bill in protest but they have taken no action till now. In fact I wanted to publish the full mail transcript in the blog but didn't to clutter the blog with nuisance of Vodafone, which claims "Happy to Help" after spending crores of rupees but does "nothing to really help the customer." Vodafone's tagline should be "Happy to Harass" instead of "Happy to Help."
Let's come to the Airtel scene. The quality of service has been good till it came to billing. I must say that the welcome call and the series of service SMSs were all very good. But when it came to billing, things have started going wrong. My efforts to get an answer for my query resulted in nothing. Instead I ended up spending an hour to make Airtel guys understand the problem. During they process they have made wrong claims multiple times and made false promises again and again. In a single day I have encountered as many as three service failures. Finally I gave up and decided to pursue it through mail. I hope they try to learn something from this.
I will post my interactions with Vodafone shortly as they seem to be thinking "Silence and No-reply as the best Customer Service actions."
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