I got my Airtel Punjab Magic pre-paid card on the Indo-Canadian bus service connecting Delhi airport and Punjab.
I had heard a lot about it as these things are common in news paper inclined towards Indian community living abroad and I am in New York.
Coming to Punjab you have a host of people giving you cell services, like spice, BSNL (as CellOne), etc.
The problems I am facing are with the SMS section and customer service.
SMS:
I CANNOT get SMS messages from abroad. No place whatsoever, as I just don’t receive SMS from any place outside of India. I have friends in UK, Ukraine, Australia, etc but not a reply. The SMS goes to them from my cell in an instant. They get messages: Failed: MY AIRTEL NUMBER.
This episode started on Dec 15, 2002. Ever since then I have been calling the customer support. The number 98150-98150 is reachable only from within Punjab. Incidentally, people on Airtel Delhi are able to send and receive SMS from abroad (any network, at least all the ones I sent to). The message center (+91-98100-51914) for Punjab and Delhi is the same when sending out messages only the way they relay the messages within the network (to the Punjab message center +91-98150-51914) is where the problem lies.
Punjab people make up a substantial percentage of the NRIs. And we really use our services and demand the same quality we get out of home. So why is Airtel not using it’s top story and fixing this problem.
Customer Service:
These so called Customer Support Executives are very young, uninformed, and defiant people most of the time. They have really no answer to most of your questions. If you ask them who will be my roaming provider in Lucknow, UP they don’t know, it is ESSARU. All they say is you will have incoming roaming. Now if I get this info on one way roaming on their ill-maintained website then why did I call them? It defeats the purpose of having a customer support team if people have to do all the research. In fact after this writing I soon will be posting a HOWTO for the Airtel.
So when you shop for the cell services please be careful as you can get really burnt if you compare them to our foreign cell providers.