Never in my life I have written a complaint. This one is coming after 6 days of doing rounds of AIRTEL shops,talking to retailer,dealer and customer reps.
This Monday (16th April 2007) I had purchased a AIRTEL SIM from a shop in Sector 30, Faridabad. I gave the shop owner documents which he wanted and I was told that the phone will be activated in a 24 hours.
Next day (17th April 2007) when the connection did not get activated I called up the shop owner (Nishant)to inquire. He told me that the SIM which was given to me cannot be activated as it belonged to the old dealer. He than offered me a choice of 5 new numbers to choose from and said these will be activated by next day evening. He requested me to give few more documents which I promptly submitted on the same evening. Here I was given the new SIM which was postpaid connection number 9971366155.
On 18th April the connection did not get activated. I gave couple of calls to Nishant who further talked to Mr Devender (sales) This time i was told that since the server was down my number could not be activated. Nishant requested me to wait for few more hours.
On 19th I went to Nishant’s shop as the connection was not active and requested him to refund my money. I was again told that if I can wait the connection will get activated by 10 in the morning. I took a call to do that.
On 20th morning when the connection was still not active I went to a AIRTEL shop in Lajpat Nagar. The customer rep Miss Poonam was very helpful. She talked to Nishant and found out number of Mr Devender and the provisioning officer (Mr Maatha) in Faridabad. The provisioning officer confirmed that my documents had come to their office but he had not received the money from the dealer. Now this is some different story which I had been hearing all this while. I was again assured that my connection will be activated by 9 PM in the evening. As expected the connection still did not get activated.
Today (21st April 2007) I again went to the AIRTEL shop in Lajpat Nagar to find out details. But no body there could help me out. When I requested for phone numbers of some senior officers of AIRTEL they could not provide me that. Their only suggestion was to keep going back to the retailer and dealer and request them to activate my number.
I have lost all my patience with the company. My money is stuck and yet I have not been able to use the service which I was supposed to get 4 days back. The whole experience has left a bad taste.
I am considering moving to the consumer courts and TRAI
Any suggestions ?
Airtel is more focussed on sales than after sales..
It is the same story here in Himachal. The 121 helplines are simply useless. The only good part of Airtel here is they have a pretty good coverage around the state and have a good network. My brother works for the company and for every small problem I have to ring him up. Guess others are not so lucky!
Well, the BPO system does have its problems, as we poor consumers have been learning through grappling with the short end of the stick. Airtel though, takes the cake. I am an airtel subscriber and have given up calling the helpline numbers, and after months of high blood pressure, wasted conversations and time, decided that its simpler to disconnect the landline! And I have heard similar stories from other friends. Just as an example, here is another one, I had to personnaly visit an airtel kiosk one day where a gentleman quite obviously from the South of the country and travelling through this part, was trying to explaint to the man behind the counter, that simplygetting through to the correct dept. at airtel takes ages and hence escalated call costs whem one is on roaming and got a pat reply from the unprofessional airtel chap -‘ well who’s stopping you from going to another phone company’! Talk about unprofessionalism and exasperation. If at that point, I had a spare shoe, I would have gladly flung it at the idiot – in line with the recent spate of journalistic modes of protest. But to be honest, not sure if airtel would have bothered about that either!